Varonian Nights

To Be Continued?

2011-06-28T11:23:00.000-07:00

I hope you've enjoyed the first eight stories of Varonian Nights. The anthology will conclude with chapters Nine, Ten, and Eleven, which I will post once I've finished editing them. The entire series will then also be available for sale as a Kindle edition.

So stay tuned!

Chapter Eight: Rookie (Part Four)

2010-08-12T08:58:00.001-07:00

(And now, the exciting conclusion of 'Rookie'...)

One does not simply walk into a Gorgon’s lair, but that is exactly what the three Greenheads did. As Lowtown continued to degenerate into violence there were no additional officers or auxiliaries to spare, so Petracchio, Aemilia, and Stefano were obliged to make the journey into the Southlander ghetto on their own. As acting Captain Aemilia lead the way-- the rookie followed hard on her heels with broadsword in hand, and Stefano brought up the rear, covering his companion’s advance with his bow.

No sooner did they reach the outer perimeter of Queen Cariebasa’s empire of tenements than the first sentries made their presence known. The laconic sniper wasted no time with these lackeys, dispatching them one after another with nary a word, barely pausing to reload before loosing the next silent but deadly quarrel.

The canals were eerily devoid of boat traffic for the pre-dawn hours, as vendors and other Lowtowners with no stake in this fight knew better than to risk straying into the line of battle. The clean briny scent of the rising tide was muddled with smoke this morning, and although the Greenheads could not yet see the flames they knew that the slums were already ablaze.

Was it Cariebasa’s faction that had started the fire, or Esposito’s? At this point it hardly even mattered anymore. All of Lowtown teetered on the precipice, and as if sensing the rookie and his comrades moved carefully through the gloom, fearing lest an errant footfall send the whole lot of them tumbling into the abyss.

Cariebasa was once not merely a Queen, but the first among her kind, a queen of queens and a living goddess to her subjects. Long before she had arrived here in the City, her devotees had been preparing her temple, as if they’d always known that their sovereign would come to live among them in exile. The tenement that stood at the heart of the Southlander ghetto was uncharacteristically splendid, the towering mud-brick walls festooned with brightly colored friezes that artists had risked life and limb to paint. Each corner of the insula had been painted so that it appeared as if the whole building were being supported by the coils of four giant serpents, and each floor of the tenement depicted successive visions of a primordial earth.

At the edifice’s foundation were the Nameless Ones, whose formless, shapeless masses seemed to ooze from the flickering torchlight provided by myriad sconces along the building’s perimeter. Above these squiggling horrors were strange creatures composed of whorls and flailing tentacles, bearing many-chambered shells or segmented armored plates like vast engines of war. Next were the great saurian beasts of the Palmlands, who once roamed all over the Three Continents when Gorgonkind was young and Man little more than the glimmer of a thought in some Creator god’s imagination. As Petracchio, Aemilia, and Stefano approached they could just barely make out the maw of a giant predator in the torchlight, its teeth looming as large as any man. What was it about to seize in its jaws?

Until now the Queen’s domain had been protected by a mixture of hired muscle and other thuggish types that choked Varo’s canals like so much flotsam, but here at the threshold of her temple Cariebasa was guarded by the faithful—a sea of bald pated, purple-clad acolytes wielding an array of halberds that seemed to have been designed by the same artist who had painted the murals above their heads, long serrated blades that curved with an alien logic, as if the weapons were never meant to be wielded by human hands. The zealots stood at the ready, and as the trio approached Aemilia cursed under her breath.

“Hold your fire, Stefano. We’re not getting through that without a siege engine.”

“Wait a minute,” Petracchio said, pointing at the ranks of Gorgon-worshippers. Impossibly, the crowd seemed to part as soon as they saw the Greenheads, with the result that even as the three came to a halt an empty path had appeared to the entrance of the temple.

Stefano shook his head, as if he did not believe his eyes. “Is it a trap?”

“Why bother?” Aemilia responded. “If they wanted us dead at this point, all they’d need to do is overrun us. Looks like the Queen wants to talk.”

The Captain did not even need to consult her comrades before proceeding. They had not come this far simply to turn back, not with the stakes as high as they were. As the trio were swallowed amid the purple-clad zealots they lowered their weapons, not so much as a sign of deference as an admission of futility. From this moment on they were in the hands of the Queen, and they knew it.

The entrance to the tenement temple was choked with offerings for the Gorgon— a dizzying array of fresh fruit and flowers, colorful embroideries, bushels of corn, red beetles, salt, and cacao, gold and silver ornaments, precious stones of every possible variety and cut, cages containing live birds, lizards, and other creatures deemed sacred among Southlanders that squeaked and chattered and roared as they past, as well as the hides and lacquered bones of unknown beasts.

Was that a human ribcage poking out from one of the piles of tribute? Petracchio tried not to think of what lengths Cariebasa’s faithful would go to so as to curry her favor. As the rookie looked at the faces of the zealots he realized that Southlanders only made up a portion of the faithful, and that men and women of all nations were represented among the Queens honor guard, their bald heads making them almost indistinguishable from one another. If he were not currently terrified beyond his capacity to reason he might have made something of this, but it was all that he could do to keep placing one foot in front of another, fighting that innermost voice within the reptilian portion of his brain that kept shouting at him to run away as fast as he could before it was too late.

Half a dozen of the acolytes broke off from the rest of the guard and conducted them—with three leading the way and the other three bringing up the rear-- into the dark entryway of the tenement and up a flight of mud brick steps so well-trodden that the center of the stairs was a grooved channel. Every square inch of the building’s interior had been covered with mosaic tiles which resolved themselves into various zig-zagging shapes and patterns which made the corridor seem to undulate under the weak torchlight, as if the temple itself were a gargantuan scaly beast.
After ascending three full turns of the stairwell Petracchio could smell something that made his heart pound within his chest even more violently than it had been before. The scent was barely palpable but thoroughly alien, something vaguely feminine but unmistakably other, and although the rookie had never in his brief mortal tenure encountered a such a monster a thousand generations of inborn memory told him the name of his terror.

Gorgon.

The purple-clad acolytes had lead the trio onto a landing which opened into a vast chamber. Once the interior of this tenement had been a honeycomb of mud daub, bamboo, and rice paper, demarcating what tiny living space there was available to each family that dwelled within, but now it was the antechamber of the Queen’s temple, where she chose to receive her visitors. Torches flickering in their sconces revealed the base of broad brick columns that there the building’s structural supports, each of them tiled in a similar manner as the walls of the stairwell, their writhing illusory scales disappearing into the inky void above their heads. Here the scent was stronger, and as the rookie glanced at Aemilia and Stefano he noticed that they were also aware of it, as the both gripped their weapons with knuckles so white that they almost gleamed like bone.

“This is most disappointing,” a voice greeted them from the deeper darkness within- a woman’s voice, accompanied by the faint but unmistakable hissing of serpents. “Pray tell, does your Captain now feel that an audience with my august presence is somehow beneath him?”

“Your majesty.” Although the words themselves were formal, Aemilia responded in a manner that suggested no such obseisance. “Captain Venatore is indisposed.”

“Indisposed?” The Queen took so long to pronounce the word that Petracchio thought that perhaps her tongue was also an asp.

“He was shot… by one of your mercenaries, if I’m not mistaken.”

The rookie’s eyes darted over to Aemilia, who smiled faintly. She of course had no such proof of Cariebasa’s involvement in the shooting, but as the voice in the dark sputtered and muttered something incomprehensible the erstwhile Captain knew that her bluff had been successful.

“This is most unfortunate,” the Queen said, attempting to regain her composure.

“That’s one way of putting it.”

“Careful, ‘Captain’,” Cariebasa’s tongue found its venom once more. “You may have the law on your side, but insolence will only end in sorrow for you and your companions.”

If Aemilia had been moved by this barely-veiled threat, she made no indication of it, nor did Stefano, whereas Petracchio was convinced that he could see the pounding of his own heart in the darkness where the Queen held her audience.

“Nevertheless, the fact remains that an officer of the Varonian shield has been gravely wounded by members of your faction,” Aemilia said. “The Greenheads do not take too kindly to those who would dare murder their officers.”

“Giro,” the medusa’s voice was barely a whisper. “Is he—“

“—his life still hangs in the balance. Only Lord Noh can tell for certain whether he will recover or not. In either case, we have more than the law on our side to haul you out of this temple in irons.”

“So why have you not done so already?” Cariebasa’s tone was equal parts curiosity and calculation.

“Because we are willing to overlook this…” Aemilia paused as she struggled to find the right word. “…accident, if you agree to stand down in this conflict with Damin Esposito.”

“Never!” the Gorgon fumed. “Not until I have utterly destroyed that damned fool. The old man knew better than to meddle in my affairs. Now I will make him pay.”

Aemilia pressed on. “He accuses you of murdering his lieutenant—the Oguntak named Esanga.”

“Of course he does! Do you take me for a fool?”

“So tell me, Your Majesty- did you or did you not kill the Oguntak?”

“What does it matter, Captain?” The Queen’s voice was not much exasperated as resigned. “It was always my fate to play the monster-- I grow weary of pretending otherwise. If it all must come to an end, let it end now. At least I will have the satisfaction of taking Titus Esposito with me.”

“And all of Lowtown with it?” Aemilia asked. “If you do not stop this madness, they will send the Black Legion. Surely you must know this.”

“I do not fear death, Captain. Nor do my followers.”

Aemilia sighed and lowered her head, uncertain as to how to proceed. Petracchio looked at his comrade-- even in the still dark of Cariebasa’s inner sanctum it was as if she could see Lowtown burning all around her and hear the piteous cries of myriad Canalsiders as the drug-addled shock troops of the Black Legion swept from tenement to tenement, killing guilty and innocent alike.

It had been almost twenty years since the Legion was last deployed in the parish of Norollo, but to this day it remained devoid of life, a haunted necropolis at the City’s heart. Unless this stalemate with the Queen was somehow broken, the same disaster would befall the Lowtown slums, scouring away any trace of this foolish conflict and its warring parties. It would be a terrible day of reckoning, Petracchio thought, and suddenly everything made sense.

“Stop!” he shouted, although no one was speaking at the time. Aemilia and Stefano actually jumped a step back, and there was equally-surprised rustling from the impenetrable darkness at the antechamber’s heart. “Don’t you see? This is exactly what they want!”

“Hold your tongue, rookie,” Aemilia hissed. “You’re not helping anything.”

The Queen’s tone was now imperious. “Let the boy speak.”

Petracchio looked at his companions—Stefano nodded as if to encourage him, while Aemilia simply glared. “Who benefits if the Black Legion is deployed?”

“No one benefits,” Aemilia said with an acid tongue. “That’s why we’re here.”

“Wrong,” the rookie responded. “No one in Lowtown benefits.”

Aemilia’s face fell as the meaning of Petracchio’s statement became apparent. She shook her head and whispered. “No. I refuse to believe it.”

“Believe what?” Cariebasa asked from the darkness.

Petracchio at last connected all of the dots. “That someone finds you and Damin Esposito so inconvenient to their plans that they are willing to sacrifice an entire parish to get you out of the way.”

The Gorgon hissed. “Senator Brindisi.”

“Senator Brindisi,” the rookie confirmed. “Who is probably even as we speak calling his fellow Senators out of bed to respond to the crisis here in Lowtown- a crisis that he caused by hiring Francesco Sabatini to kill the Oguntak and frame you for it. Brindisi is more familiar with Lowtown than any other Senator—he would have known that such a provocation would have pushed Old Man Esposito over the edge and started a gang war.

“What he didn’t count on however was Captain Venatore’s special relationship with you, Your Majesty. No sooner had Esanga’s body appeared in the Secundo than the good Captain was having it disappeared by his auxiliaries—gang war averted, right? Only it wasn’t, because before the corpse could be gotten rid of completely the SPQVs showed up on the scene, almost as if they knew exactly where they should be.”

“Sabatini must have tipped them off,” Aemilia said with a bitter expression.

Petracchio nodded gravely. “See, that’s what I thought at first myself. But then Sabatini slipped up and told me where Esanga’s body was supposed to have shown up—right on the Queen’s doorstep, and not drifting with the tides along the Secundo. Not only would Inspector Pomilio and his agents be in the wrong place at the wrong time, but they wouldn’t have had any jurisdiction to investigate just another murder in Lowtown.”

“So what are you saying?” It was Stefano who spoke now, as Aemilia had fallen strangely silent.

“What did Pomilio offer you to be his spy, Aemilia?” The rookie squared to face the erstwhile Captain. “Did he promise you Venatore’s command, once you helped destroy him? Or was it a cushy Inspector’s job with the SPQV’s? Or was it just for the money?”

Stefano was the first to answer the accusations. “Now wait a second, rookie! Aemilia is a straight arrow just like me- aren’t you? Aemilia, tell Petrarch that he’s out of his mind here.”

But Aemilia said nothing. By torchlight her comrades could see that there were now tears streaming down her face. An awkward silence fell over the antechamber, although Petracchio swore that he could almost hear the Queen chuckling from the preternatural darkness.

“Aemilia?” Stefano’s voice seemed distant and hollow. “Tell me it isn’t true. Tell me you haven’t been working for them.”

The erstwhile Captain shook her head slowly. “I had to, Stefano. He’s rotten and you know it. You’ve only been here a few days, rookie—tell me that I’m wrong.”

Petracchio did not answer, but Stefano responded with uncharacteristic emotion. “So when were you going to tell me?”

“Oh, Stefano.” The tears fell more freely now. “I’m so sorry.” Aemilia reached out to her lover, but the laconic Greenhead took a step back in defiance.

“Amusing as this tale of love and betrayal may be,” Queen Cariebasa spoke. “I would like to know how you intend to prevent the good Senator from destroying us all.”

The rookie smiled. “I was hoping that someone would ask that.”

---

The plan was devilishly simple. Captain Arturo Serafinelli may have presided over a decidedly quiet parish, but Caecilia was perfectly situated in the shadow of Hightown, such that when the acting Captain of another precinct issued a warrant for the arrest of Senator Brindisi’s son on suspicion of trafficking El Mirad ol’ Cap’n Seraf was immediately able to snatch the playboy at the base of the Punti di Mille Piedi at the conclusion of his all-night revels and deliver him down to Lowtown by a swift launch. No sooner did the boy arrive than the Senator was already suing for peace and offering to cooperate with the SPQVs in exchange for not having his son shipped off to Egg Rock.

With peace having been secured, Cariebasa brought her soldiers back from the brink and made the rare concession of visiting Nocciola in person to beg for peace. So the trio of Greenheads stood and watched from the colonnade of Old Man Esposito’s confraternity lodge while the damin and the veiled Gorgon Queen exchanged pleasantries that passed for threats, or threats that passed for pleasantries— even after almost a week on the Lowtown beat, it was hard for Petracchio to tell which was which.

In the early morning shadows, Aemilia gave Petracchio a wan smile. “You did it, rookie.”

“’Never burn your bridges,’” Petracchio said. “That’s what the Captain told me on the first day.”

Aemilia looked down at the flagstones of the colonnade. “So. Are you going to tell him what I did?”

“Tell him what?” the rookie asked. He gave Stefano a sidelong glance; the laconic sharpshooter nodded.

Aemilia fought back another round of tears. “Thank you.”

“We Greenheads take care of our own.”

The trio digested this for a moment while they watched the negotiations continue within the courtyard. There was a tinkle of laughter from the Queen—was the old damin actually flirting with her now? And was she actually flirting back?

“So Petrarch,” Srefano said. “When this is over Aemilia and I were thinking about going to check up on Venatore. Care to join us?”

The rookie sighed. “Thanks for the invite, but I have one more report to file.”

---

This time Petracchio did not wait. The steps of the SPQV’s Terminalia headquarters were even more crowded this morning than on his previous two visits, but instead of queuing up with the others the rookie simply strode up to the entrance of the building, ignoring the hostile stares and grumbled sounds of protest of those who had camped out all night in order to secure their audience. A functionary in grey attempted to head him off as his crossed the threshold, but Petracchio waved him away with enough menace that the clerk recoiled from him as if he’d been struck. No one else dared accost him as he navigated through the dark, silent corridors; when he at last found Inspector Pomilio’s corner office, it was almost as if the SPQV agent had been expecting his interruption all along.

“Ser Petracchio!” the Inspector greeted the rookie with a broad smile. “Congratulations on solving your first Lowtown murder. You’re the talk of the City right now, son.”

Petracchio allowed himself to smile at this, but only for a moment. “I have come to make my final report, sir.”

Pomilio frowned. “The case is closed, rookie. There’s no need for you to be here. Sorry if the Greenheads didn’t make that clear on your end.”

“This was Rosario’s doing, wasn’t it?”

“Como?” The Inspector tried to control his surprise, but Petracchio could see the flicker behind his eyes even as he looked down at his sheaf of paperwork.

“You heard me. Rosario hired Sabatini to kill the Oguntak. If you follow the money trail I’ll bet it goes straight to Senator Brindisi, but it was Rosario who gave the order. Everyone in the chain was expendable— even you.”

Pomilio glowered over his files. “If you’re implying that I had something to do with Esanga’s murder, you are way out of line, son.”

“You didn’t have to,” the rookie explained, his palms turned outward. “In fact, it makes more sense if you weren’t involved. As soon as the boy turned up in the Secundo, however, you would be. And that’s exactly what Rosario was counting on.”

The Inspector’s jaw fell open as the realization dawned on him. “Venatore.”

“Someone leaves a mess on Giro Venatore’s doorstep so big that even he can’t make it go away. But of course he’ll try, and in doing so give you all the ammunition you need to destroy him. The perfect set-up. It would have worked perfectly, too, if I hadn’t opened my mouth at the crime scene and got stuck reporting to you instead of Aemilia.

“With the Captain out of the game, there’s absolutely nothing to keep Cariebasa and Old Man Esposito from tearing Lowtown asunder, prompting Senator Brindisi to do the only sensible thing remaining: deploy the Black Legion.”

“I’m such a fool,” Pomilio said, his head buried in his hands. “All this time I thought I was following his footsteps, when he was actually dogging mine.”

Petracchio lowered his voice to a whisper. “Who is this person? How can he have so much power?”

“I don’t know. But I fear that you have made yourself a powerful enemy by upsetting his plans.”

The rookie grimaced. “Not bad for my first week on the job, eh?”

---

Petracchio arrived at the nunnery shortly before dark. Although the violence that threatened to consume Lowtown had now abated, the air was still heavy with the stale rank of smoldering wood. Amazingly, one of the tenements had been wholly consumed by fire, however, and both the Queen and Damin Esposito had lent their footsoldiers to assist the efforts of the local bucket brigades to extinguish what flames continued to defy the steady rain which had settled in shortly after noon. The rookie wondered if the Red Legion was here and if his old boss Arlix weren’t at this moment prowling the insulae for signs of smoke and loose silver; he smiled at the thought.

Stefano and Aemilia were long since gone, and it was late enough in the day that Petracchio had to browbeat the sisters to be permitted to enter the shrine. To his surprise, Giro Venatore was not only awake but sitting up when he entered his cell. The Captain’s skin still had a deathly pallor to it, but his grey eyes were as bright as he’d ever seen them.

“So, rookie. I hear you’re a big damned hero. Congratulations.”

Petracchio shrugged at this and stared at the big man’s wound, thinking of whether he’d be upright and talking right now if that repeater bolt had found its intended target. Almost certainly not, he thought. It was almost as if Captain Venatore were tougher than death itself.

“I suppose you can have your pick of assignments now. So what’ll it be? Hightown? The Old Quarter? Maybe a nice office job in the Varony?”

“With all due respect, sir, I’d like to stay on the Lowtown beat.”

“Oho!” The Captain exclaimed so loudly that he provoked a painful coughing fit. “And why would you ever want to do that?”

“Because this is where I belong, Captain.”

Venatore considered this, then smiled. “We’ll make a halfway decent Greenhead out of you yet!”

Petracchio smiled in return, then cleared his throat. “Sir...”

“Out with it, rookie.” The veteran’s slate eyes were locked on those of his junior officer’s, as if he could read the latter’s mind.

“Before I came here I paid the Queen a visit.”

The rookie produced a small black velvet pouch from within the folds of his uniform. The material was as dark as night itself and tied shut with a golden string.

“When you told me that you’d do anything to change what happened to Terzia, I didn’t think at first that you’d meant it literally,” Petracchio said. “Then I realized why you were so eager to protect Cariebasa’s interests.”

He proffered the bag to the Captain, who at first shrank from it. What a strange sight, to see this great fearless slab of a man frightened of anything. “What is it?”

“It’s your wish.” The rookie pushed the dark velvet into Venatore’s hands. “As far as the Queen is concerned, you no longer owe her anything. Capsice?”

The veteran looked at the tiny parcel in his hands. He drew the black velvet up to his face and breathed deeply, as if he were inhaling a long forgotten scent. Giro Venatore whispered something inaudible, then kissed the bag gently before handing it back to the rookie.

“Sir?”

“Not like this,” The Captain shook his head. “What would I say to her? That I made a deal with a monster in order to bring her back? She deserves better than that—I understand now. Thank you, Petrarch. But you can give my wish back to Queen Cariebasa.”

Petracchio gripped the velvet pouch tightly. “Actually Captain, I think I may have a better idea.”

---

Somewhere in Lowtown a ’21 Magliozzi plied the back canals, black lacquer cutting through black waters. Its pilot, a young woman, was not accustomed to being followed, having long since mastered all of the tricks that a gondolier can learn in order to move about the City unmolested, but there was something familiar about her pursuer that gave her pause. With one hand on the punt and another gripping the stock of her hand crossbow, she hailed the mysterious stranger, who drew closer in his own hired fast boat with both of his hands in the air.

“You’re the cop from the Arena,” Evangelina said, easing her finger off the trigger of her bow but not letting go of the weapon.

Petracchio smiled. “And you’re a difficult person to track down.”

The girl looked at the Greenhead with a searching gaze. “That’s why I’m still alive. If you’re going to try and arrest me, I hope for your sake that you’ve brought backup.”

“We tried that once and it ended poorly. No—I’m here to right a wrong.”

Evangelina took her hand off the crossbow. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Do you recognize this?” The rookie held up the black velvet satchel; from her sharp intake of breath Petracchio knew that the girl knew exactly what it was.

“How did you get it?”

“It doesn’t really matter,” the young Greenhead answered. “Do you know what to do with it?”

The girl nodded, dumbfounded.

“Then it’s yours. Catch—“ he said, tossing the pouch across the dark water between them. Evangelina snatched it from the air with expert reflexes; briefly she inspected the bag’s contents, then she looked at Petracchio again with a suspicious gaze.

“Why?”

“Because some good should come from all of this,” Petracchio said.

The girl laughed in a way that was far less mocking than it could have been, but mocking nevertheless. “You must be new around here.”

Petracchio shrugged.

“Hope you don’t live to regret it.” Evangelina said, already shoving off into the night. “Arreviderce, rookie.”

The junior officer watched the ’21 Magliozzi disappear around the corner of the next juncture, then told his oarsman to take him back to the precinct house. He was already late for his shift, and the Lowtown beat waited for no one—not even a big damned hero.

Chapter Eight: Rookie (Part Three)

2010-08-12T08:35:00.000-07:00

The next day Petracchio returned to Terminalia to make his second report to Pomilio. This time he had to wait in the sweltering heat of a rare sunny morning, as the SPQV Inspector had several clients whose business was sufficiently important that he could not shrug them off as easily as those of the previous day. The fine weather seemed to have drawn out twice as many petitioners, none of whom had brought any meaningful protection from the sun either, and who would likely end up beet-red by noon if they didn’t secure some shady real estate along the building’s portico.

As the rookie sat on the broad marble steps he wondered how Aemilia was faring. Although Stefano had been able to recover from the girl’s poison in a few hours, his partner had still been comatose when Captain Venatore finally sent everyone home for the night save for himself. The veteran Greenhead would hold vigil over his officer at the shrine they’d brought her to after she’d collapsed—a quiet sanctuary to Aemilia’s namesake saint in her old neighborhood. The Lowtown canalside along which the shrine stood used to be an Old Varonian community, but was now mostly inhabited by Lakers and their distant Skraeling cousins. Neither race had any time for the Church of the One True God and its myriad saints, so when the Greenheads brought Aemilia a dozen nuns had nothing better to do than drop everything and cluck over the headstrong girl now in their care. When at last the mother superior and chief physician announced to Venatore that Aemilia would recover from her head wound, the Captain told Petracchio and Stefano to get some rest.

“What what do I tell the Inspector?” The rookie was still sore that Venatore had not shared the specifics of Sabatini’s interrogation, and wished that he had been close enough to the conversation that it had not been drowned out by the roar of the crowd. That unfamiliar name lingered in his memory, as did mention of Queen Cariebasa. How were they related?

Whatever the connection was, his Captain was still being less than forthcoming about it. “You tell Pomilio that if his beancounters apprehend a girl punting a ’21 Magliozzi that she is wanted for the assault of two Greenheads and that she is to be remanded to our custody. No funny business. Capisce?”

Petracchio baked on the brilliant white marble, feeling his bruised lips crack in the sun. The sutures on his face itched terribly, but he did not scratch them for fear of undoing Stefano’s magical handiwork. Instead he sat and fantasized about splashing his face with a cool draught of water from one of the City’s deep freshwater springs. Briefly he contemplated abandoning his place in the queue to go find some kind of liquid freshmen, cool or otherwise, but given the crush of people waiting and predatory looks with which his fellow clients regarded his spot he’d be lucky if could even get within sight of the SPQV headquarters again this morning, and he knew there’d be Eieron himself to pay if he failed to deliver his report and Venatore’s message.

What was it about that girl, he wondered as a lizard sunned itself warily within a stone’s throw. Don’t let your guard down, friend, Petracchio thought. Bask a little too deeply and you’ll be someone’s breakfast. The rookie shook his head as a knot of Shan-li kids did exactly what he was thinking and tried to spear it with a sharpened cane of bamboo- the lizard exploded into motion, seemingly in half a dozen directions at once, then was gone to continue its sunbathing in a more hospitable location. As the Middle Kindgom children yelled at each other for squandering their opportunity for some free street meat the Greenhead laughed. At least he’d remembered to eat breakfast this time, if nothing else.

Petracchio tried to remember if this Evangelina had been around in the old days, when he and Sabatini had run with Arlix’s gang. He was fairly certain that he would have remembered a girl who looked like she had, as even from the fleeting glimpse that he’d caught of her last night at the Arena he knew that she was a looker. Dangerous, too. Something wasn’t adding up, though. If she were in fact Sabatini’s girlfriend, as his Captain had claimed, then what was she doing wandering around the canals of Lowtown all by herself? Petracchio knew Sabatini well enough to know that any woman of his wouldn’t be allowed to leave a room without a small army of goons in attendance, let alone in the company of some Oguntak lowlife. And what was Queen Cariebasa’s angle in all of this?

The rookie’s ruminations were interrupted by the sound of an SPQ V page shouting out his name- Petracchio scrambled to his feet, shaking off the pins and needles in his legs as she followed the young clerk out of the sunlight and into the cool, dark bowels of the building’s interior. It took a few minutes for Petracchio’s eyes to adjust to the gloom, during which he passed a blur of fine architecture and many faceless men and women dressed in grey. The SQPV headquarters felt less like an outpost of law enforcement than it did a Varonian Counting House, and sure enough at regular intervals the Greenhead caught a glimpse of rooms full of savants whispering their way through never-ending columns of numbers, no doubt checking a certain Great House’s ledgers against their own records for signs of fraud or other financial malfeasance. Petracchio shuddered at the thought of being cooped up in such a chamber for his waking hours, being expected to do nothing but add, subtract, multiple, or divide- having the shit beaten out of him every night on the Lowtown beat seemed to be a dream job in comparison.

“By the Seven, kid—you look like Hell.”

Inspector Pomilio did not mince words as the junior Greenhead entered his office, which lay somewhere deep within the complex. There were no windows to the square room, just bookshelves which extended from floor to ceiling and were filled with leatherbound codices whose contents could not be readily identified from the gold-leaf glyphs stamped into each spine. Pomilio’s desk was a slab of marble piled high with scrolls, tomes, and loose sheets of papyrus, several inkwells of various colored dyes, and a curious machine comprised of numerical dials and polished brass gears.

The SPQV agent noticed that Petracchio was staring at this contraption, which gleamed coldly under the blue-white light of the room’s fungus globes.

“You like that, eh? It’s an ancient Salumar artifact, recovered from one of the Nine Sacred Cities. Don’t even ask me how much money I spent to have it restored—if I had a wife, she would have killed me several times over.”

“What does it do, sir?” Even though Pomilio had spoken to him in his normal speaking voice, the rookie whispered, for fear of violating some obscure SPQV regulation about noise.

The Inspector’s eyes brightened. “It’s a computer. By setting the dials and turning the gears, this machine can do an entire day’s work of a counting house in mere seconds. Let me show you.”

Pomilio fiddled with the contraption as he inputted an array of numbers, then clicked on several gears to pop them in and out place. The rookie blinked in disbelief at the turning mechanism and the totals which flashed in mother of pearl as the Inspector operated the device.

“I don’t understand, sir. If such machines exist, why don’t the Great Houses use them?”

“That is an excellent question, indeed! But think about it—if devices like this do all of the work, then who wields the power?”

Petracchio balked at the question initially, but then it came to him like a bolt from the blue. “The men who make the machines!”

“I knew I liked you for a reason, son. Yes. Every counting house is firmly under the control of its mathemagicians, but a device knows no loyalties. Tell me—what do you know of the Information Wars?”

The rookie blinked, trying to remember his woefully inadequate parochial education. “Umm. I know that House Dandolo won. Right?”

Inspector Pomilio laughed. “That’s more than most of my agents recall. You are correct that House Dandolo was one of the victors, but few people know who the real losers were: the makers of these machines.

“Five hundred years ago the greatest threat ever to the Senate and People of Varo emerged. Enough of these machines had been recovered from the ruins of Old Salumaria that artisans were able to divine their inner workings and replicate their functionality. The Clockmakers’ Guild was born, and its members suddenly found themselves in possession of more computational power than all of the Great Houses combined.”

“Why are you telling me all of this?” Petracchio asked, fearing that he already knew the answer.

The Inspector stopped turning the crank that powered the machine. “Because this City is in danger again, son, and I need your help to save her.”

“Me?” The rookie laughed out loud at this. “I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but I’m not likely to survive my first week on the Lowtown beat, let alone save a million Canalsiders.”

Pomilio fixed the young Greenhead with a serious expression. “It is not ours to decide what destiny has in store for us, merely to discern it for what it is. Whether we embrace that fate or not—that is our decision.”

“Then explain,” Petracchio said, still unconvinced. “What does any of this have to do with my destiny?”

The Inspector gestured towards the notes piled on his desk. “For several months now the SPQV has been aware of some… irregularities… in the City’s financial affairs. At first it was a minor accounting error in the official ledger of a Great House, perhaps a misreported series of transaction at one of the fori—things like that. Harmless in isolation, easily enough rectified, problem solved. Right?

“Only these inconsistencies, they turned out to be related to one another. How we finally figured this out is a long story that I don’t want to bore you with, but let’s just say that the key to discovering what was going on was to be found in the bond market. A brilliant young mathemagician connected the dots for us and we moved to arrest the parties involved. Case closed… or so we thought.

“Problem was, even though the person we sent to Egg Rock admitted his guilt and even demonstrated how he was able to do what he did, the irregularities continued to appear. Which meant—“

“—which meant that you had a conspiracy on your hands!” Petracchio exclaimed.

“Exactly. Our man had been a willing patsy, surrendering himself to draw attention away from the actions of his compatriots. And it even worked for a little while… until the other night.”

“Esanga,” the rookie whispered. “You’re talking about the Oguntak, aren’t you?”

Pomilio smiled. “You are definitely sharper than the average Greenhead, I’ll grant you that. Esanga the Traitor is quite an interesting individual- not your typical Canalside rags to riches story, that’s for sure. One day he’s sifting through shit on a garbage barge, then all of a sudden he’s displaced Yan Liao as the most feared crime lord in the Three Parishes.

“If the story ended here it would not interest us, aside from the obvious El Mirad angle. But the El Mirad is just a means to an end, you see- the obscene amounts of money that Esanga is now making from his illegal drug empire are being diverted along some very curious channels that are most unusual for a two-cyp criminal. Or any criminal, for that matter. Money is going up to Hightown. The Senatorial families’ financial affairs are normally immune to our investigations, but the Council of Eleven granted us access owing to the special circumstances. We found our money trail, and it lead us straight to one of Varo’s most respected Senators.”

“Let me guess,” Petracchio said. “Gaius Brindisi.”

The Inspector’s mouth fell open. Before Pomilio could recover enough to ask him how he knew, the rookie explained:

“Easy. The Senator spends a lot of time in these parts doing charitable works, or so I’ve been told. It’s the perfect cover for any number of illegal activities. That would also explain why his brat of a son thinks he owns the place.”

Pomilio could only nod at this. “The Brindisi family is definitely mixed up in something big. Chances are they don’t even know what they’ve gotten themselves into.”

“What do you mean by that?”

The Inspector stopped fiddling with the Salumar computer and faced the Greenhead head-on, his dark eyes gleaming like obsidian. “Does the name ‘Rosario’ mean anything to you?”

Petracchio cocked an eyebrow. “Should it?”

The SPQV agent didn’t answer him immediately—the rookie felt Pomilio sizing him up again, as he did when they first met the other night along the dirty waters of the Secundo. He suspected that if the Inspector could have dialed his soul into the brass machine on the table between them and turn the crank to divine his truth worth through the mysterious workings of its countless tiny cogs and gears, then he would have in a heartbeat. The junior Greenhead swallowed hard and said nothing until Pomilio replied at last.

“If you are withholding something, Ser Petracchio, then I am obliged to remind you that obstructing the investigation of an SPQV inspector is a serious offense.”

“Thank you for the warning, sir. I’ll keep that firmly in mind.”

There was a flash of impatience in Pomilio’s expression—impatience and anger. “You realize that he’s in the middle of all this, right?”

“Who?” The rookie asked, knowing full well whom the Inspector meant.

Pomilio’s smile was no longer kind. It was the toothy mirthless smile of a predator circling its prey. “Your Captain. All of those denars washing through his precinct, you think he doesn’t get his taste?”

“Venatore’s a bastard, but he’s not dirty.” Petracchio tried to say this in a way that suggested that he himself believed it, but his voice quavered as he did so. He recalled what the Captain had said at the Arena about seeing the light. “He can’t be.”

“Tell you about the girl, did he? Poor little Terzia. Old Giro loves to trot that one out early on to establish his bona fides with the new recruits. I bet he left out the best part, though. Did he happen to mention what he did when he found out that the girl was carrying his child?”

Petracchio’s stomach became leaden. From the Captain’s telling of the story it hadn’t been clear whether Terzia had lived or died; the rookie had assumed the latter. He dreaded what was coming next as the Inspector filled in the rest of the tale:

“So our hero, desperate to restore his credibility with his fellow gang-bangers, tries to force the girl to go to an apothecary to get rid of the baby. She refuses. What Giro does to Terzia makes the beating she took from her brother look like a relaxing trip to a Shan-li bathhouse. Throws the poor girl down a flight of stairs and breaks her neck. The chief magistrate wants to try him for murder, but Venatore’s old man has some pull with the local cittadini and spirits him away into the Marines on a penal regiment assignment instead.

“So when he comes back from Ryzien, Giro is a changed man. Or so he says. He may say he’s playing for our team, but don’t be fooled. A dog is only as good as his options, rookie. And this Lowtown mutt has so many options.”

Petracchio shook his head, attempting to disbelieve everything that he’d just heard. Inspector Pomilio also shook his head, a patronizing look on his face.

“You don’t have to take my word for it. Ask Titus Esposito, if you dare. Ask Queen Cariebasa. You think it’s a coincidence that Lowtown is a haven for monsters? Instead of sending them to Egg Rock, he offers these lowlifes safe harbor. Who knows what kind of banh binh he gets for his trouble, while the rest of us get to pay the interest. But not for much longer.”

Pomilio drew closer to the rookie, so close that he could see the cracks and wrinkles that belied the SPQV agent’s youthful mien. Petracchio recoiled as the Inspector’s sudden tirade reached a furious new intensity, tinged with righteous anger.

“This dead Oguntak, he’s just the beginning of a reckoning that’s long overdue. Make no mistake, boy-- this is the endgame for Giro Venatore. I’m sorry that you’ve come at such an awful juncture, but when I’m through with this investigation the last place you’ll want to be standing is between your Captain and me.

“Got it?”

---

Petracchio couldn’t quite recollect how his meeting with the Inspector had concluded, only that he was relieved beyond measure to be out of Pomilio’s lair, so much so that he didn’t notice that he was being followed until he’d returned to his adopted Lowtown neighborhood. Nocciola was bustling, the midmorning sun almost threatening the customarily staid reserve of this ancient parish within a parish—colorful vendors staked out every available square inch of canalside with their wares as a jabbering tide of black-clad Old Varonian matrons haggled over every last bit of produce, meat, cheese, and bread for sale. Young children ran laughing through the chaos, criss-crossing the footbridges and racing between the merchants’ stalls, while the older boys noodled around on the water in their family’s lacquer or rickety skiffs of their own, trying to impress the young ladies who sat in groups of three or four on the granite quays, giggling amid their adolescent gossip.

The rookie stopped to admire the selection of one of the flower vendors as he picked up the tail. It was the shrine-bearer from the previous morning- the one who had beaten him to a pulp at Damin Esposito’s bidding. How he hadn’t spotted the thug before was a testament to the ogre-like man’s preternatural stealthiness, but now that he had been made the shrine-bearer made no attempt not to be seen. Suddenly he was standing so close to Petracchio that he actually cast a shadow over the junior Greenhead, who blinked up at the man, his hand on the hilt of his broadsword.

“Easy,” the shrine-bearer said in a low voice. “I’m not about to wring your neck on a market day. If I’d wanted to do that, I’d have done it before you left Terminalia- am I right?”

Petracchio was only somewhat reassured by this. “All right. So what do you want with me then?”

“The boss would like to have a word with you.”

The rookie couldn’t help but laugh. “So now he does give a damn about me. Is this a good or a bad thing?”

“Don’t get cocky. It means we’re all in much deeper shit than we thought.”

“Fine,” Petracchio said. “Lead the way.”

The shrine-bearer nodded, then motioned away from the canalside markets towards a cul-de-sac where a cluster of thugs sat on the portico of a confraternity lodge. A veritable Old Varonian institution, the confraternity was filled to bursting with the parish’s elder menfolk, who took advantage of the market day to escape their own households and socialize while their wives and daughters bargained with the vendors. Petracchio recognized a couple of the men outside as fellow shrine-bearers—their animated conversation ceased as soon as they saw him, but they opened their ranks to allow him to pass in their comrades’ care.

The lodge house was dingy, its whitewashed walls long since curdled into a sickly yellow from untold generations of Voordian pipeweed and opium smoke. The two men walked along a hallway featuring a row of busts that stared at them with blank eyes, ancient sons of Nocciola whose names could barely even be read on the tarnished bronze plaques affixed beneath each august visage. They passed several open doorways, where old men sat and played dominos in between long draughts on Salumar water-pipes or drinks from open amphorae of wine—in the distance one could hear a boy singing and the tinkling laughter of courtesans.

Petracchio wondered if he’d made a huge mistake in coming here. If he had made a break for it in the market at least there would have been witnesses if he’d failed to escape the beefy shrine-bearer. But hadn’t those same Canalsiders watched him get thrashed the other morning without so much as raising a finger to assist? No, he was a dead man either way. At least by choosing to go quietly he might actually get some answers before the inevitable end.

The long hallway eventually opened up into a large square internal courtyard whose colonnaded impluvium was a carefully-manicured series of fish ponds. The shrine-bearer lead the Petracchio over a wooden footbridge to a small grassy island, where a lone old man sat sunning himself in a Shan-li wicker chair. At first it seemed as though he was taking a late morning nap, but as the two drew near the old man snapped to attention and spoke:

“Piacere. I am Titus Esposito. Come and sit for a while, eh?”

No sooner had the rookie set foot on the island than attendants sprang from the shadows of the colonnade and set two identical wicker chairs opposite the old man, so Petracchio did as he was told and sat. The shrine-bearer did so as well, the rattan creaking uneasily under the henchman’s massive frame. “Careful there, Mauro.” The old don teased. “I just had that chair recaned!”

The two Canalsiders had a good laugh over this, while Petracchio did his best to look amused as well and not as terrified as he in fact was at that moment. Damin Esposito was a man of slight build—although he had no doubt been wizened by the passage of time, the rookie got the sense that the Gentle Don came out of his mother’s womb this way, all bones and sinew but taut as the string of a crossbow. Esposito had a shock of white hair that ringed his bald and spotted forehead and gathered itself below into a beard that jutted out like the tuft of an old mountain goat; his green eyes were flecked with gold and constantly flicked around the courtyard, taking in everything that they could. When the damin spoke, his Old Varonian accent was unmistakable, yet unlike others of his neighborhood his words were always intelligible, if not painfully clear.

“Would you care for some wine?” Esposito did not wait for an answer, nor did his servants wait for a command—as soon as the damin said the word, an amphora appeared, along with three goblets made of white gold. One servant filled the cups as the other handed them first to Petracchio, then Mauro, and at last to the old man, who gave the bouquet a tentative sniff before taking a sip. The enormous bodyguard on the other hand downed the contents of his goblet in one undignified quaff, proffering the cup to the attendants for a refill.

“I’m afraid we got off to a bad start, you and I.” The Gentle Don made it clear that he did not intend this as an apology, so Petracchio made no attempt to acknowledge it as such. “Retirement is a nasty business, this much I can tell you.”

The rookie sat and stared at Esposito with a frozen smile, deathly afraid to move or speak, clutching his still-full goblet as if it were the only thing keeping him from plunging into a bottomless abyss. The old man frowned.

“That was a joke, boy.”

“Forgive me, Damin, but I don’t quite understand why I’m here right now.”

Esposito’s green eyes stopped wandering long enough to fix the young Greenhead with a gaze that was as searching as it was mocking. “Ah, but I don’t think that’s true.”

“It’s Inspector Pomilio’s investigation, isn’t it?” Of course, Petracchio thought. The old man is scared. Whatever understanding Titus Esposito may have had with Captain Venatore didn’t count for a damned thing if the SPQVs had a Greenhead from the Lowtown beat who was actually willing to talk to them. Had the old don known that Pomilio was already on the Oguntak case there’s no way he would have let his bodyguard Mauro rough him up the way he did. That’s why Venatore had come here the day before—not out of any concern for his new recruit’s well-being but to stop Esposito’s mobsters from compounding their stupidity and driving the rookie straight to SPQV headquarters.

The Gentle Don’s lack of an answer was all the confirmation that Petracchio needed. Look, the young Greenhead wanted to say. I have no intention of telling the Inspector anything about whatever you and the Captain are into, so don’t worry. But he also knew that this was the only leverage he had. For the first and possibly the last time during this case, the moment was his. So the rookie mustered his most enigmatic smile and waited for the ancient damin to swallow his pride and break the silence first. Titus Esposito mumbled a curse in Old Varonian, then spoke the four words that the rookie was hoping to hear:

“What do you want?”

“Information.”

The old man slumped in his chair. “Very well. Ask.”

“Tell me about Esanga.”

Esposito sighed and motioned for one of the servants to refill his goblet. “What a damned shame. That boy was one in a million. These Oguntak, they don’t care about tradition at all. They come here with their masks and their blood feuds and may the One True God help you if you think you can make them care about anything else.”

Petracchio nodded. For all intents and purposes he could be sitting in the precinct house, right now listening to his Captain. No wonder these two were thick as thieves. The Gentle Don continued unbidden:

His people called him ‘Esanga the Traitor’- do you know why?”

The rookie shook his head.

“Because when the Southlands went to hell, Esanga stood with the Crusaders. Even after I-town itself gave up on the Crusade and let their own sons and daughters fend for themselves in the godforsaken jungle, even when his own countrymen saw the writing on the wall and disavowed their alliances with the Northerners, he stood with them until the very end.

“Now here was a boy with a sense of honor. I didn’t care where he wore a mask or smeared himself with his own shit, because he believed in something bigger than himself.”

“Is that why the Queen killed him?”

The old damin narrowed his eyes. “What did you say?”

Petracchio fumbled for a response. “I- I- I thought the Captain told you.”

“No,” the Gentle Don said with a tone of voice that was quiet, yet anything but gentle. “In fact, when he came to me yesterday he told me that she had absolutely nothing to do with it.”

The rookie didn’t know what to say to this, fearing that he’d already said far too much. Why hadn’t Giro told him?

Esposito spat. “That reptilian bitch. Ever since she came to Lowtown it hasn’t been the same. There was a time when you could be a proper villain in this City, boy, before the Great Locks vomited up every last bit of savagery from the Southlands. Now the old ways, they don’t count for nothing. Niunte. You follow me?”

The rookie stood mute before the Gentle Don’s fury, which clearly had been building for who knows how long. Esposito did not wait for Petracchio to respond:

“For years Cariebasa has been muscling into my turf, and that fool Captain of yours has done nothing to stop her. ‘Keep the peace, Titus.’ That’s all he tells me. ‘Keep the peace’! What has she ever done to keep the peace? At every juncture I have been the one to stand down, surrendering another block, another parish, giving up another line of business. And for what? I used to run this City, boy, and now look at me. I’ve become a joke. The damin of some shit alley that even Lowtown has forgotten.

“But no more.” Titus Esposito stood up from his cane chair on a whim, waving away the attendants as they sprang to assist him. “If the Queen wants a war, then so be it. I am no longer interested in keeping the peace. Tell your Captain that if he wants peace so badly, then he should tell Cariebasa to go back to the Palmlands where she came from!

“You can also tell Venatore that the next time he comes to my neighborhood he’d better bring a platoon of Marines for a bodyguard. I don’t know what kind of chess game he thinks he’s playing, but I am no one’s pawn. Capisce?”

---

As Mauro lead Petracchio back the way they had come down the long hall of the confraternity hall, he muttered over his shoulder. “You got balls, kid. I’ll give you that. Most people shit themselves when they find they’re face to face with Old Man Esposito, but you stood your ground.”

The rookie said nothing, still reeling from the havoc he had unintentionally loosed during his audience with the damin. Mauro, sensing Petracchio’s angst, stopped halfway amid the neighborhood’s ancestral busts and put a huge meaty paw on the copper’s shoulder.

“You think you fucked things up, but you’re wrong. The damin would never have let this insult go unanswered, no matter how much Venatore tried to smooth things over. The Queen, she crossed the line.”

“’This dead Oguntak, he’s just the beginning of a reckoning that’s long overdue,’” the rookie mumbled to himself, recalling Inspector Pomilio’s parting words.

“What?” Mauro asked.

“Nothing.” Petracchio shook his head. Suddenly he had a thought. “Tell me, Mauro. Did you know Esanga well?”

The bodyguard looked at the young Greenhead for a moment before answering. “I suppose. Most Southlanders keep to themselves, but Esanga was different. He was a good soldier, that one.”

“He ever mention a girl to you?”

“Evangelina.”

Petracchio raised an eyebrow. “You knew her?”

“You don’t forget a girl like that, you know what I’m sayin’?”

The rookie nodded.

“Yeah, Esanga was real sweet on her. Really riled up the Old Man, though.”

“Because she was Sabatini’s girl?”

Mauro snorted at this. “Sabatini! As if he’d know what to do with a tight bit of chiton like that. No, I’m talking about the Queen.”

“What?” Time seemed to stop for a moment as Petracchio tried to make sense of what he was hearing. Fortunately the bodyguard didn’t seem to understand the importance of what he was saying, so not only did he repeat himself, but offered some clarification for good measure.

“The girl, she’s with Cariebasa. You know…” Mauro seemed unable to find the proper words for their liaison, but Petracchio understood nonetheless, although the repercussions of such understanding left him unable to say much in response. The giant Canalsider lead him back out on the portico and into the afternoon shadows; before he left, he offered one final bit of advice.

“Keep your head down, kid. Because things are about to get ugly. Capisce? If I were you, I’d think of a whole different line of work altogether.”

---

Venatore flew into a white-hot rage when Petracchio reported the details of his conversation with Old Man Esposito. As the Captain stormed about his office destroying whatever he could of his spartan furnishings the rookie briefly considered whether he should have brought Stefano in with him as backup, but the veteran Greenhead did not lay a finger on Petracchio, nor did he ever threaten to do so, although at the end of his outburst he leveled a thick calloused finger at the young man. “Any blood that is spilled—this is on you, son.”

The rookie tried not to flinch at Venatore’s stern malediction and swallowed hard. “No, it isn’t.”

A murderous glare across the oak table, the only thing that the Captain had not overturned or smashed at this point. “What did you say?”

“I said it isn’t on me, sir. And you know damned well that it isn’t. It’s you. It’s always been you.”

Venatore said nothing to this, which Petracchio took as tacit confirmation. “What I don’t understand, though, is why.”

“Leave it, rookie.” The Captain’s growl would have been enough to make the junior Greenhead soil his trousers just a couple of days ago, but Petracchio could see through the bluster now.

Before he had a chance to press his question a second time, however, they were interrupted by Aemilia, who entered Venatore’s office without knocking. Her head was still bandaged and she moved with a tentative step, but already the fire had returned to her eyes, as had her slight but unmistakably bemused smile.

“Well, now!” the Captain exclaimed. “Look who’s back from the dead.”

Aemilia surveyed the wreckage of the veteran Greenhead’s office. “What happened here?”

Venatore looked at Petracchio, then back at Aemilia. “Nothing. Just felt like a little Spring cleaning, and our rookie was kind enough to help me. Isn’t that right, Petrarch?”

The Captain had never used Petracchio’s familiar name before, which caught him entirely off-guard. He sighed and nodded his head. “Yup. Cockroaches the size of spiny Aeedian lobsters.”

“Fine. Don’t tell me. Idiot boys and their idiot arguments. Just fill me in on what I’ve missed.”

“Are you sure you’re ready to come back?” There was something in the way that Venatore asked the question that suggested an uncharacteristic amount of tenderness for the Captain—Petracchio noticed that Aemilia placed her hand on her abdomen, if only for the briefest instant before withdrawing it self-consciously.

“I’m fine, Captain.”

Venatore resumed his gruff mien. “Fine. Then find your partner and let’s go and try to stop ourselves a gang war, shall we?”

---

The bloodshed had already begun. No sooner had the Captain and his rookie officially begun their Lowtown beat than they were summoned to the scene of a shooting near the Laker tenements—two Canalsiders lay dead on the cold granite, their blood being washed away by a hard rain even as Venatore and Petracchio approached.

“These are a couple of Esposito’s boys,” the Captain grunted. “I guess the Queen got his message.”

While the auxiliaries secured the crime scene, Petracchio adjusted his rain gear and looked at Venatore. “I didn’t know that Aemilia was carrying.”

The Captain appeared surprised at first at the rookie’s statement, then gave a grim smile. “Yes. I’ve tried putting her on clerical duty ever since I found out, but the girl just won’t listen. She says she’d rather die than proofread my reports.”

Despite all that had transpired that day, Petracchio couldn’t help but laugh. “Are you…?”

“Are you kidding! Aemilia has better taste in men than me, even if they do tend towards the obsessive.”

“Stefano.”

“Give the rookie a prize for his deductive prowess!” Venatore shouted at one of the auxiliaries as he clumsily handled one of the bodies, then turned back to Petracchio. “Officially the Greenheads frown on this sort of thing, but who am I to stand in the way of true love?”

The way that the Captain’s voice caught when he said this gave the junior Greenhead pause, so the two watched the auxiliaries work as the rain fell even harder now on the quay and the obsidian waters of the canal. Finally, Petracchio cleared his throat.

“Pomilio told me some things when I met with him this morning. Things about you.”

“Yeah.” The Captain’s response wasn’t a question, but the acknowledgment of the inevitable.”

“About Terzia.”

Venatore looked away. “There are many things I’ve done in this life that I’m not proud of, rookie. But there’s only one that I would do anything I could to take back.”

“Sir?” Petracchio was waiting for the Captain to elaborate, but when he glanced at the veteran Greenhead he saw his hand on the hilt of his broadword.

“We’ve got company- get down!”

How he had spotted the shooter in the driving rain was anyone’s guess, but no sooner had he shouted than the Captain shoved his junior officer aside. Petracchio felt the first missile whistle just past his ear, while the second hit Venatore square in the chest. As the Captain roared with pain and fell onto the slippery granite the rookie unslung his crossbow and ducked behind one of the dockside pilings just as the third shot twanged, the iron bolt exploding into the stone with a white puff and microscopic shards of rock.

Petracchio peeked around his cover to see the telltale black velvet hood on a gondola whose dark lacquer seemed to merge into the surrounding canal like something out of a dream. His training as a Marine suddenly returned to him as he listened to the clanking of the repeating crossbow’s gears. There was always a split second in between volleys as a fresh set of bolts fell from the hopper and fed into the machine—the rookie waited for the right moment, then popped up from behind the piling and took his best shot. Someone cursed from underneath the hood, and the repeater failed to engage for a second round of firing, at least for the moment. Petracchio dashed back to where his Captain had fallen, and found him attempting to prop himself as he slipped on the oily granite and his own blood.

“Easy, sir.” The rookie saw the iron bolt protruding from his Captain’s torso, having sundered the layers of cured leather and chainmail as if they’d been a costume made of tissue paper. Petracchio had seen worse wounds in the cranberry bogs of Deltaine, to be sure, but never a man who had ever tried to get up after being hit like that.

“Don’t let… the bastards… get away,” Venatore croaked, his words punctuated by shallow agonizing breaths. Petracchio’s eyes darted back to the canal but the lacquer was already long gone, having melted back into the rainy blackness. The auxiliaries were already scrambling towards the two of them to assist their fallen Captain, having abandoned the bodies of Titus Esposito’s footsoldiers on the other side of the pier.

Petracchio gripped his partner’s hand tightly. “We’ll get ‘em, Cap. Don’t you worry about that.”

“Petrarch.” Venatore’s fingers felt cold as stone, and his voice was little more than a hoarse whisper now. “The Queen. Tell the Queen.”

“Tell the Queen what?”

The rookie repeated his question but the Captain only gurgled a few barely audible syllables, then fell silent. One of the auxiliaries, a burly Ashlan Cherin with a mustache so waxy that it defied the rain in a manner that was comically incongruous, sized up the injury as soon as he reached their side. “The precinct apothecary isn’t going to be able to help him with this. Nor are the good sisters at St. Aemilia’s, for that matter.”

Petracchio already knew this from his time in the field. He also knew that of the handful of surgeons in the City who could successfully treat a wound as grevious as this, one of them just so happened to work for an old friend.

---

“You want me to do what?”

Francesco Sabatini stood glowering at the rookie from the steps of his private marina. As soon as he realized what he’d have to do in order to save his Captain’s life, Petracchio flagged down the swiftest-looking piece of lacquer that happened to be cruising by and commandeered the vessel with a raised crossbow. The hapless punk kid did not offer so much as a peep of protest, and it was only about halfway through the race to Orsilia along Varo’s quiet side canals did the Greenhead learn the reason why: the gondola had been stolen on a midnight joyride, a crime to which the boy tearfully confessed on his own volition once he recognized the unmistakable visage of Girolamo Venatore looking up at him from the velvet passenger seat. Petracchio told the kid that if he could deliver the Captain to Sabatini’s alive he’d let him go, but if he failed to do so he’d personally deliver him to Egg Rock—the rookie could swear that he had never seen someone row a boat so hard.

Petracchio stood with one foot in the gondola, the other on the granite quay. Venatore lay sprawled in the boat, one of his arms trailing in the dark water. His body was a lifeless slab, his normally ruddy skin as grey as if he were Cebalese. The mustachioed auxiliary stood and held the lacquer against the tide, the young gondola thief having been heaved overboard as soon as the phosphorescent lamps of Sabatini’s nightclub emerged from the gloom. “You heard me. Get your surgeon- now!”

The damin was apoplectic. “After what he did to me at the Arena? Venatore humiliated me in front of my own men. I say let the bastard die.”

Petracchio stepped fully on the quay. “Please, Cecco. Do this as a favor to me. For Arlix’s sake.”

A couple of neckless musclebound thugs materialized to intercept the Greenhead as he moved towards the foot of the marina steps, but Sabatini called them off with a hiss. “You’ve got a lot of nerve cashing in on his name to help out a lousy copper.”

The rookie held his ground and did not answer. There seemed to Petracchio to follow an eternity of silence that was only broken by a low groan from deep within the gondola. How Venatore was even still alive at this point was a miracle; that he could yet stir sent a shiver down the junior Greenhead’s spine. When his gaze darted back from the Captain, he could see his own fear and wonder reflected in the damin’s eyes. What sort of beast was this man, that Francesco Sabatini was afraid to let him die?

“Bring him in,” he barked to his henchmen, who obeyed without so much as a word. As Petracchio followed them up the stairs, however, Sabatini put a firm hand on his shoulder. “After this we’re through, you and I. Capisce?”

The junior Greenhead nodded as if to agree, whereas in fact both men knew damned well that the two had long since passed that point a long time ago.

Her name was Ingrid. Arlix’s second-in-command, the Skraeling woman had captivated the hearts of many a poor hapless Canalsider before Sabatini and Petracchio fell under the blonde warrior goddess’ spell, but none had fought as fiercely for her affections as these two rookie cutpurses. Although normally aloof and reserved, Ingrid allowed herself to be amused by this rivalry, and despite her boss’ warnings not to, she took every opportunity to encourage their amorous zeal until it was inevitable that one or the other should do something that would be as foolish as it was irrevocable.

As the damin’s personal surgeon-- a butcher from Orsilia who was reputedly as adept at carving Sabatini’s victims into untraceable chunks of meat as he was putting the living back together-- Petracchio waited in one of the nightclub’s rooftop chambers, a penthouse office whose décor was nothing more than a garish and expensive attempt to look tasteful. Heavy velvet curtains enrobed a room filled with lacquered furniture made from Southlander hardwoods, interspersed with pieces of art that had been chosen more for their price than their aesthetic appeal: here was a horrid little square painting on a decorative easel, there was a painted vase big enough for a grown man to hide inside.

“See what sort of things you can buy when you’re not living hand to mouth on a Greenhead’s salary?”

“It’s the hidden costs that always get you, Cecco.”

The damin sneered at this, then changed the subject. “Your beloved Captain will live, or so my surgeon tells me. Apparently he has the constitution of an ogre king.”

“Don’t sound too disappointed.”

“Are you kidding? Do you have any idea of how this will raise my stock among the Varonian underworld. ‘Francesco Sabatini is so fearless, he’ll send his own physician to heal your wounds before finishing you off.’”

Petracchio couldn’t help but laugh at this. “You always manage to find an angle, don’t you?”

“That’s why I’m the guy in a position to grant someone like you a favor.”

The rookie narrowed his eyes. “You ever see Arlix?”

Sabatini shook his head. “The old Skrae doesn’t want anything to do with me-- too successful for his tastes, I suppose.”

Petracchio wanted to say something unkind in response to this, but mindful of his situation he thought better of it. “How about Ingrid- she still come around the club like she used to?”

“Not since Evangelina. You know how Ingrid feels about competition.”

“Speaking of competition, did you know about Evangelina’s liaison with Esanga? Or the Queen, for that matter?”

Sabatini’s face hardened. “Is this part of your investigation, Petrarch? I didn’t realize that you Lowtown coppers had jurisdiction here.”

“You’re probably right,” Petracchio shrugged. “But I bet the SPQVs do.”

“What?”

“In case no one told you, this is a joint investigation. So you can either answer my questions, or talk to one of their Inspectors.”

The damin looked indignant. “You don’t think I killed the savage, did you?”

“You tell me,” the rookie said. “As far as I can tell, you have a pretty compelling motive, not to mention a history with this sort of thing.”

Sabatini’s demeanor was now cold and reptilian. “So that’s what this is about. Payback for what I did all those years ago?”

“No—it’s about a murdered man and the gang war that has followed in its wake.”

“Let the Lowtown scum die!” Sabatini’s dark eyes flashed. “You think you’re doing anyone a favor by trying to keep those animals from killing each other? Even your Captain isn’t that naïve.”

Petracchio wanted desperately to come back with a rejoinder as stinging as his old comrade’s words, but what had Sabatini said that wasn’t manifestly true? Less than a week on the beat and already the rookie feared that Lowtown was not a place where anyone made a difference—a sailor could sooner change the tides.

“Trust me, ‘mici,” the damin said. “Queen Cariebasa did everyone in this City a huge favor by setting that worthless Southlander adrift on the Prospero.”

Petracchio’s heart stopped, but he caught himself before he allowed his jaw to fall agape or ask the damin to repeat himself. It was all he could do to finish the conversation without betraying any more than a junior officer’s interest in his Captain or the curdled mixture of nostalgia and bile that befitted an old comrade turned rival. His mind was already floating backwards up the Secundo on an Eieronian tide, sharply turning to the right as it joined the waters of the Prospero.

---

“Sabatini didn’t know the body had been found on the Secundo,” the rookie explained to Aemilia and Stefano as he breathlessly briefed his fellow Greenheads on the situation once he’d returned to the precinct-house, which despite the late hour was buzzing with activity. The gang violence had already intensified in the short while that Petracchio was gone, with the result that Lowtown had rousted the day police rotations from their slumber and pressed as many auxiliaries into action as they could muster on such short notice. With the pikes and shields of the auxiliaries and the heavy riot armor of the regulars, one could almost think the entire City were under siege.

“That explains why he didn’t know the SPQVs were involved. He must have almost stained his velvet robes when I told him.”

“That doesn’t prove anything,” Aemilia said as Stefano strung and restrung his crossbow for the eleventh time. As the Captain convalesced in the same nunnery that she had, Petracchio noticed how quickly and easily Aemilia fell into the role of commanding officer, as if it were a part that she had been born to play. She considered the rookie’s case as he presented it, then proceeded to demolish it as systematically as Venatore would have, albeit with less profanity. “No cittadini would even think about moving on someone as protected as Sabatini on evidence that weak, even if he did have a plausible motive. Besides, you saw the bite marks.”

Petracchio’s mind was racing. “What if someone put them there to throw the Captain off the scent? I know that he’s been covering for the Queen. So as soon as he saw what to his eyes was incontrovertible proof of her involvement, he’d dispose of the evidence immediately. Which is exactly what he did.”

The erstwhile Captain thought about this. “Go on.”

“Consider also the fact that Esanga’s body was found naked. Tell me, Aemilia- how long have you been on the Lowtown beat?”

“Fourteen years,” she answered almost immediately, without even pausing to think about the question.

“And when’s the last time you found a naked man in the drink?”

Silence.

“Now a woman, yes, I’ll buy it. A prostitute makes a bad decision or a nice girl makes the wrong turn down an alley at night and the predictable happens. But even then to find a body without a stitch of clothing on it is rare. Caecilia might be another world as far as this beat is concerned, but I saw enough shit while I was there to know what seems all kinds of wrong.

“Whoever murdered Esanga stripped the body so that the people who found him wouldn’t miss the bite marks. This much is for certain.”

“But why couldn’t that have been Cariebasa herself?” Aemilia protested. “I know enough about the Queen after fourteen years of keeping her out of trouble. I didn’t always approve, mind you, but it was the Cap’s call. He long since earned his right to lead us off a cliff, and for all I know he was right all along. Less than three days after this boy turns up dead and see how quickly it all goes to shit!

“Queen Cariebasa is proud. If the word Canalside is right that she and this girl Evangelina were lovers, then Esanga’s sudden appearance may have been enough to provoke her to something this stupid. Or have you never crossed the line out of love?”

Petracchio’s ears burned at this, but he said nothing. Aemilia continued:

“All I know is that if we don’t put a stop to the fighting, it’s just a matter of time before the Senate sends the Black Legion down here.”

The rookie’s hair stood on end. The Black Legion! It had never occurred to him that Lowtown was teetering so close to the precipice that this was even an option, but what did the Senate care about a bunch of lowlifes and immigrants fresh off the boat? It was probably only because of Venatore’s tireless efforts that the pitiless and drug-fueled Black Legionnaires hadn’t scoured Lowtown several times over at this point.

Stefano surprised the both of them by looking up from his heavy crossbow and saying, “Why don’t we just ask the Queen what happened?”

The rookie and Aemilia looked at Stefano, then each other. “What would the Captain say?” Petracchio asked.

“No doubt he’d call us a bunch of idiots for even entertaining the thought,” Aemilia replied with a wry smile on her face.

Stefano chuckled, then snapped the well-polished gears of his crossbow back into place with a resounding click. “So when do we go?”

TO BE CONCLUDED!

Chapter Eight: Rookie (Part Two)

2010-07-29T08:07:00.000-07:00

Petracchio had a scant hour of sleep before it was time to leave for Terminalia. Stefano and Aemilia had warned him to set out early, for the SPQV headquarters would gather large crowds before dawn. As the only manifestation of authority in the parish, the SPQVs were routinely mobbed by suppliants bringing every conceivable matter to their judgment. Here the Greenheads were accorded no special privileges, so it was entirely possible that he would have to wait all morning just to file his report. The rookie paused at the washbasin just long enough to splash some water on his face, then left his tiny apartment before the cloudy skies had fully brightened. He hadn’t expected anyone to be Canalside, so it was quite a surprise when he stumbled down his rickety steps into a full-blown processional to a saint he’d never even heard of.

When Petracchio had secured a room in an Old Varonian neighborhood, he thought little of his choice, but when he told Captain Venatore where he was living the veteran chuckled. “That’s Damin Esposito’s place.”

Titus Esposito was a legendary figure from the Varonian criminal underworld, a boss whose domain had touched almost every one of the City’s ninety-odd parishes at its height. What had made him truly famous was not his empire, however, but the fact that he was one of the few mobsters who had ever successfully retired. If Petracchio had ever had cause to speculate as to where the “Gentle Damin” had ended up, never in a million years would he have guessed that it would be some tiny alley sandwiched between the crumbling tenements of Lowtown, but as it turned out this is where Esposito had started.

“Nocciola,” locals called it, the last vestige one of the original parishes that had been subsumed by a never-ebbing tide of immigrants from the four corners of the Three Continents. Most Canalsiders had simply allowed themselves to be displaced and resettled elsewhere in the City, but some dug in and continued to go about their business as if nothing had happened.

Nocciola was a neighborhood seemingly untouched by time, an impression that was reinforced by its myriad festival days celebrated only along this particular stretch of canal. Petracchio had to force his way against the flow of elbow-to elbow traffic moving in the opposite direction towards one of several shrines- men, women, and children were all dressed in Old Varonian drabs, as if for a funeral, although the portable altars that some of the burlier menfolk carried on their shoulders were adorned with brightly-colored flowers. The rookie struggled to make out the words of the processional hymn, but the dialect was parochial and ancient and defied his attempts to understand it. Despite their clean-shaven faces and sacred demeanors the altar bearers to a man looked like the kind of neckless thugs who would just soon kill a man as blink.

“At least you won’t get robbed,” Venatore had joked with him. Nevertheless, Petracchio made a mental note not to give any of his neighbors offense as long as he lived in their midst, as cop or no cop he had a hunch that they wouldn’t hesitate to express their violent displeasure.

After he had successfully cleared the neighborhood celebration, a light rain began to fall- Petracchio pulled his dark green hood over his head and picked his way through a cluster of insulae and its inhabitants as they readied for another hard day of work. Lowtown was surprisingly easy place to get lost, as not only are the massive tenements all similar in appearance, but they effectively blot out any other potential landmarks that might guide someone see king his way. The rookie was certain that he’d doubled back on his route several times as a result before he found the track of a canal that he knew intersected with the Secundo and followed that to the boundary with Terminalia.

As the rain started to fall a little harder now he crossed this administrative no man’s land at the nearest bridge and cut a path through a sea of floating wharves and warehouses in various states of business, trying not to draw too many curses from the longshoremen whenever he interrupted their work to pass them by. The young Greenhead knew that he was already running later than he should be and quickened his pace, hoping that the weather would deter at least some of the crowds that he anticipated when he got to the where he was going.

Alas, even in what was now driving rain the Terminalia headquarters was overrun with humanity, such that it appeared at first glance to be more like another Lowtown tenement than the farthest-flung outpost of the SPQV. Petracchio swore aloud as he looked at the hundreds of petitioners camped out on the steps of the square marble edifice that rose above and stood out from the utilitarian commercial real estate over which it held sway. From the makeshift awnings and sputtering cooking fires of the local food vendors it was apparent that most of the Canalsiders had spent the night on the cold marble in hopes of securing an early appointment with the magistrates within, and the rookie’s heart sank while he contemplated spending every last minute of his off-duty hours sitting and waiting with everyone else, chilled and soaked to the bone.

After several heated interactions with swindled merchants and aggrieved artisans who were zealously guarding their positions Petracchio located the tail end of the queue. No sooner did he start shuffling towards the foot of the marble steps, however, than Petracchio felt a tapping on his shoulder. He whirled about to see Inspector Pomilio, holding a parasol in one hand and a greasy sausage wrapped in flatbread in the other, which he proffered to the Greenhead with a smile.

“Hungry?”

Even though he was in fact starving, having forsaken breakfast to come here to Terminalia, the rookie shook his head; Pomilio shrugged. “More for me, then. I had a feeling I’d find you out here. Giro’s got you in the doghouse already, doesn’t he?”

Now it was time for Petracchio to shrug, however slightly, as although this is exactly what had happened he wasn’t keen on giving the SPQV such an easy point.

“I admire your loyalty, rookie. Less than a day on the force and you’re already willing to take a crossbow bolt for your Cap. We don’t encourage that kind of thinking in our agency, mind you. Blind devotion can lead to some pretty questionable behavior, capisce?”

Sensing that this was some kind of test, Petracchio made no answer. The two stood silent in the rain for almost a full minute before the Inspector spoke again: “Well, if you’re not going to eat at the very least hold the umbrella so I can!”

The rookie laughed and took the handle of the ungainly parasol. Imported from the Southlands, Canalsiders as a rule eschewed umbrellas as proof against the omnipresent Varonian rains, opting instead for cheap waterproof togs or slick Ferrari drag. That Pomilio was susceptible to such an exotic indulgence seemed further proof to the junior Greenhead officer that he was not to be trusted, although as the Inspector hungrily munched his sausage sandwich he did have to admit that it looked and smelled delicious. Pomilio kept talking through mouthful after mouthful of his standing breakfast:

“I’m not going to pretend that listening to petitioners from sunrise to sunset is my idea of a good time, but at least we get some decent food carts haunting our office. Think about it—who’s going to sell week-old horsemeat to the SPQV?”

Petracchio couldn’t help but crack a smile at this, because it was true. It was only with the SPQV’s chop that vendors could ply their oleaginous wares, so at the very least they’d better make sure that they didn’t give Inspector Pomilio and his ilk indigestion. The rookie found the veteran agent equally engaging and off-putting. Although he was happy to be talking to someone more amicable and much less brusque than Captain Venatore, he was nevertheless wary of the angle. Surely he didn’t make ingratiating small talk with every Greenhead he crossed paths with?

“All right copper, you’re here to make your report. So report.”

The rookie talked while Pomilio demolished what remained of his breakfast: “The swimmer was an Oguntak named Esanga.”

The SPQV agent almost choked when he heard the name. “So you’ve heard of him.”

“Who hasn’t! Esanga was responsible for moving most of the El Mirad in the City south of the Hill.” Pomilio wiped his greasy hands with the sandwich wrapper. “So your hunch about this not being a tribal thing was spot on. Bravo. But how did you I.D. him so quickly?”

“The mask again.”

The Inspector narrowed his eyes. “How so? Hundreds of young Southlanders wear those plain white masks.”

Was this another test? Petracchio swallowed hard. “Maybe, but this one had been broken in half and mended.”

Pomilio nodded. “That’s Esanga all right. Can’t believe I missed that detail last night.”

“We all did, sir. It wasn’t until afterwards that I remembered. And Esanga wasn’t a Lowtowner. It didn’t make sense for his body to show up in the Secundo like that.”

“Good detective work, kid. So any idea how he ended up as naked as Ogumi made him?”

Petracchio looked away sharply. “Still drawing a blank on that.”

It seemed unlikely that Pomilio believed the lie, but nonetheless he did not press Petracchio on it as they stood in the rain. The SPQV sucked on a bit of gristle lodged between his teeth, as if to emphasize the fact that he wasn’t going to call the Greenhead on his bullshit answer, then sighed. “Well, you’ve got more than us then. So let’s call this Advantage Greenheads. But it’s a tournament, not just a match-- capisce, rookie?”

Petracchio nodded. “I get it.”

“All right then,” the Inspector smiled. “We’ll see what we can find out on our end-- foul some canals and see what comes up for air. I’ll expect another report tomorrow- same time, same place."

Pomilio didn’t wait for the Greenhead to acknowledge his directive, but strode away with a sudden burst of energy up the marble scala. At first the massed petitioners began to hurl insults and threats at him, but when they got a better look at his grey velvet robes and silver medallion of office they parted like a drop of oil in a bowl of water.

The rookie watched Pomilio ascend the stairs until he was out of sight, adjusted his hood against the now-steady rain, and started back towards the looming gloom of Lowtown. As we walked he tried not to think of what he hadn’t told the SQPV agent. For no sooner had the Inspector and his two subordinates exited last night’s crime scene than Petracchio had noticed something unusual on the dead Oguntak’s body: two circular puncture wounds on his left thigh. He pointed out his observation to Aemilia, who responded with a barely-swallowed curse.

“What the Seven is that?” Petracchio asked. “It looks like…”

“Never mind what it looks like!” The rookie’s best guess was cut off by Venatore’s booming voice. Petracchio started as he saw the veteran Greenhead approaching almost as quickly as he’d left, this time with a handful of Lakers in tow. One of the ruddy-faced giants was none other than Seamus, the roustabout whom the veteran Greenhead had knocked about earlier that evening- the Laker refused to make eye contact with Petracchio, but set himself to the Captain’s instructions silently behind his black eye and swollen lower lip.

The Lakers were carrying a length of rope, a string of fishing weights, and enough canvas to rig out a small far trader. As they converged on the waterlogged corpse they muscled the rookie and his fellow Greenheads aside, provoking a sullen note of protest from Aemilia. Her accusation was matter-of-fact:

“You saw it, didn’t you?”

Venatore said nothing but this, save to match glare for glare. Aemilia was no so easily discouraged, however. Even as the roustabouts began to wrap the Oguntak and make the sailcloth fast with the ropes, she opened her mouth to press Venatore again, but the Captain turned his back on her and barked at the Lakers. “Do a proper job with those knots, boys, or I’ll make your lives even more miserable than they already are.”

Petracchio was at a loss. “Can someone please tell me what’s going on here?”

More silence from the Captain, who did not even seem to acknowledge the rookie’s question. For his part, Stefano just shook his head. Aemilia sighed and took Petracchio by the elbow. Still only steps away from the other Greenheads and the men who were now fastening the leaden fishing weights to the wrapped and tied bundle, Aemilia spoke to the junior Greenhead in a conspiratorial whisper.

“Surely you’ve heard of Queen Cariebasa.”

Petracchio’s heart stopped for an instant. The Gorgon Queen! Of course he’d been aware of the fact that Cariebasa lived here amid the slums of Lowtown, where the Southlander immigrants worshipped her a living goddess, but despite this fact it had never occurred to the rookie that he might actually cross paths with her in the course of doing his job.

The City had more than its share of gods and monsters, but Varo was so vast that most Canalsiders could go from the cradle to the grave without rubbing shoulders with anyone more famous than their local cittadini. Maybe you’d catch a glimpse of the Ogre King as his barge sailed up the Grand Canal or have the good fortune to sit in the same eating palace as a retired hockey star, but even these minor brushes with celebrity were rare indeed in a city of a million souls.

This was different, however. As Petracchio recovered from his shock he made sense of the evidence that he had briefly noted- evidence that was about to be spirited away to the bottom of the Great Sea. “Why?” he asked Aemilia. “Didn’t you just say—“

Captain Venatore cut him off with a booming voice. “—that’ll be quite enough from you tonight, rookie! When you make your report to Pomilio, you will mention none of this. Capisce?”

The junior greenhead stood dumbfounded as he watched the Laker roustabouts finish their work and hoist the Oguntak’s lifeless body over their shoulders. Where would they dump him, Petracchio wondered- the Bay of Skulls, where myriad anonymous corpses fed the sharks and crabs, or someplace more remote? Before the rookie could ponder this question further, however, the Captain materialized directly in front of him and broke his reverie by jabbing him in the chest with an index finger as big as a sausage.

“I said do you understand?”

Although chided, Petracchio did his best to cling to what remained of his pride and met Venatore’s gaze head on. “Yes, sir.”

The Captain grinned. “That’s more like it, son. We’ll make a proper Greenhead of you yet!”

With several hours to spare before his second night of rounds with Venatore, Petracchio thought he might actually succeed in stealing a couple hours’ siesta, but those dreams were dashed as soon as he reached the cul-de-sac of Nocciola to find a beefy Canalsider sitting on the stoop of his tenement. “Piacere,” he said with a rough mumble.

The rookie looked at the Varonian tough and recognized him immediately as one of the shrine-bearers from earlier that morning. Built like a orangutan from the Middle Kingdoms, some tailor had nevertheless managed to squeeze him into a rather expensive cut of Ferrari drag, which repelled the rain as he sat as if by magic.

“You’re the new kid on the force, right?”

Petracchio cocked an eyebrow. After twenty-four hours of tiptoeing around his new Captain and the SPQVs, the rookie was feeling tired and reckless. “Let me guess. Your boss would like to meet me?”

The beefy thug chuckled in a mirthless tone that sobered up Petracchio immediately. “You think the old man gives a damn about you? Sorry, paesan. But I do need you to deliver a message to your boss.”

“Why can’t you tell him yourself?”

“Because it doesn’t work that way.”

Before the rookie had a chance to ask exactly what the shrine-bearer had meant by that, he felt something blunt and heavy land on the back of his neck. A blow like this should have crumpled a man of Petracchio’s stature, but the split second before the club connected the junior Greenhead spotted the sudden movement out of the corner of his eye and started accordingly. Howling in pain, he whirled to face his assailant, only to be rewarded with a punch to his kidney from another Canalsider who had also been closing in while the big-necked lug had been distracting him. This time Petracchio did go down, falling to his knees as the shrine bearer rose from the stoop.

“Tell Venatore he’s playing with fire,” the beefy thug said. “And if he’s not careful, all of Lowtown will burn. You got that?”

Barely able to breathe, let alone speak, the rookie groaned and nodded. The shrine bearer smiled broadly. “Bene.” He then kicked Petracchio square in the teeth, and all went dark.

---

“Great shades of Zeferelli! What happened to you, rookie?”

Petracchio was aware that all eyes in the precinct house were on him and the purplish mask of flesh he was currently wearing as a mask. He wasn’t sure if he’d come to a minute or an hour after the thugs had worked him over, but it was clear that they’d continued their beating even after he’d collapsed unconscious, such that everything on his body now either ached or simply oozed. The rookie managed to clamber back up to his apartment by himself, as his landlords dared not be seen helping him, where he lay on his bare floor until just before sunset, coughing in pain as his wept in silence.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this, he thought to himself as he watched dust motes dance in the sunbeam that his tiny window permitted. While Petracchio knew that the Lowtown beat would be a challenge, he never imagined that in just the space of a day he’d run afoul of the SQPVs, the kingpin of organized crime, and his commanding officer. If these were commonplace occurrences he wondered how anyone even survived the first week. Gently the rookie probed his ribs, sensing that the big shrine bearing thug had succeeded in fracturing one or two of them as certainly as he’d broken one of his teeth with his heavy boots.

The junior Greenhead closed his eyes and took as deep a breath as his battered chest would permit while he considered his options. If he didn’t get up right now, before the sun went down, he might as well not bother. No doubt Captain Venatore would just shake his head and cluck something to the effect that he knew it all along, that the rookie from Caecilia didn’t have what it took to run with the big dogs of Lowtown. Maybe the crusty old bastard was right, and Petracchio didn’t belong here, but he would be damned if he were about to give his new the Captain the satisfaction of being right.

Pain coursed through his entire body as he rolled over and slowly stood up, steadying himself with one hand on the frame of his bed and the another on the chest of drawers that was the only other piece of furniture in his cramped room. With what remained of the day’s light he examined himself in a small mirror of polished bronze and cleaned up the cuts on his face as best he could, turning the brown water in his washbasin bright pink when he was finished. Satisfied that his wounds were simply ugly and not necessarily serious, he adjusted his broadsword and headed back down to the canalside of Nocciola, knowing full well that even though no one looked the rookie in the eye they watched him carefully nevertheless.

Petracchio walked with a deliberate confidence-- even though every such stride caused him agony in a million different places, he dared not betray so much as a hint of weakness to this neighborhood, so as to say to them: Yes, you can beat me down, but if you want to stop me altogether you’re just going to have to kill me. When he finally made it to the precinct house he maintained the same defiant bearing, for whatever message he’d intended to telegraph to the good Canalsiders of Nocciola went double for his new Captain and Lowtown’s boys in green. Truth be told, the rookie felt that it was worth every excruciating moment just to see Venatore’s jaw drop.

He contorted his broken face into a smile. “Fell down some stairs.”

The Captain snorted. “A couple of times, from the looks of it.”

“Well, you know those Old Varonian stoops.”

Venatore narrowed his eyes. “Indeed I do.” While he continued to affect an air of good-humored ribbing, the Captain quickly looked around the common room, then fixed his gaze squarely back on Petracchio with an expression that all but screamed: Don’t say another word- not here.

“Why don’t you see if Stevie-boy can’t stitch up your face? I’d rather you not bleed all over Lowtown tonight.”

“Sure thing, Cap.”

Stefano’s father had been a tailor, as had his grandfather, his great-grandfather, and who knows for how many generations before that. Naturally the assumption had been that Stefano would take up the family trade when he came of age, but despite his skill with a needle and thread the boy had other plans. “I ran away from home,” he explained to Petracchio as he sutured one of the more ragged cuts on his face with a deft hand. The rookie grunted, trying not to shift in his seat while Stefano’s needle wove its healing magic, stitch by painful stitch.

“Why?”

Stefano laughed. “Why does anyone do the stupid things they do? I was a little bastard who thought my father was worse than the Ogre King himself. Then I left the City and learned the hard way how good I’d had it all along.

“By the time I came to my senses, though, the family business had folded and my father had drunk himself to death. So I joined the Marines. Did you know that tailors make some of the best sharpshooters?”

Petracchio shook his head before he remembered that his fellow officer was trying to stick a needle into his face. Stefano jerked the point away from the rookie’s eye and clicked his tongue irritatedly. “Hold still. Yes, it’s not just the steady hand, but the patience. You could spend days sitting in the same blind waiting for that one perfect shot. The moment you get bored and let your mind wander, that’s when your target inevitably wanders into your scope.”

Stefano finished his sutures at last. Putting down his needle and catgut thread, he held the junior Greenhead’s head by the temples and peered closely at his handiwork. “That should suffice. Just don’t go falling into any canals until those cuts heal, because the Lowtown apothecary doesn’t have anything strong enough to ward off an infection like that.”

Petracchio laughed, feeling a twinge of soreness somewhere in his chest as he did so. “I’ll ask the Captain not to toss me into the Secundo again then. Grazie.”

“Niunte, ‘michi.”

The rookie’s gaze wandered over to the wall, where Stefano’s oversized crossbow was propped carefully on its stock. He noticed for the first time the brass eyepiece mounted to the frame and the complicated set of knobs and dials which accompanied the optics. Stefano noticed his interest and brightened himself as he picked up the weapon and proffered it to Petracchio.

“You like? It took months to get those lenses ground to spec. The sight is one of a kind.”

Petracchio handled the crossbow with a gentle reverence. His marksmanship had always been fair to middling, but he’d been able to handle a broadsword better than most of his fellow Marines. Sharpshooters were equally revered and reviled by those on the front line, but the rookie had had nothing but admiration for those eagle-eyed comrades who dealt swift and silent death from a distance.

“What’s the range on this thing?” he asked Stefano in a voice tinged with a childlike wonder.

“Always ten yards further than the bad guys think,” a voice boomed through the makeshift infirmary, causing Petracchio to start and almost bobble the crossbow, which Stefano retrieved quickly with all the jealousy of a proud new mother. Captain Venatore stood in the doorway. “It’s a damned shame that we didn’t have Stefano back in Ryzien- we could have just sat on the poop deck and drank Salumar brandy while he picked off insurgents one by one. You all in one piece again, rookie?”

The junior Greenhead nodded.

“Good. Because I have a surprise for you tonight. The Blues are in town.”

---

Locals like to joke that Lowtown only has two buildings among its countless tenements and crumbling insulae that aren’t in constant danger of collapsing at any given moment- the Precinct House and the Arena. The former is due to its fortress-like construction, as the headquarters for Lowtown’s Greenheads had once been the stronghold of an Old Varonian baron who lorded over the isles that had comprised the southern half of the City before parish after parish was slowly but irreversibly filled in so that the only water between the ancient rocks were the narrow canals. The Arena, however, was built exactly for the purpose that it currently served- as a venue of cheap spectacle for Varo’s hardest luck cases.

Many centuries ago it bore witness to countless gladiatorial matches when the City was young and its thirst for raw bloodsport easily slaked. Over the years however the Varonians refined their entertainment so that even though the violence was a constant presence its expression was ever more sophisticated. Pit-fighting yielded to Salumar ballgames, Three Man from the Great Lakes, then finally the sport of hockey. While rare is the idle pastime that the City does not clasp to its bosom with great zeal, Varonians took to this curious game imported from the frozen lakes of the Voordian Peaks as if they had conceived of it themselves, and within the space of a generation every parish had at least one hockey rink, much to the delight of ice merchants from the Tiglarnan highlands.

Depending on whom you asked, the Arena’s mammoth capacity was either a boon or a blessing. The rich turned their noses up at the terraces that rose in concentric levels above their luxury boxes, whereas those who flooded those cheap seats night after night were their most enthusiastic partisans. The open-aired structure required some serious machinations against the ever present rain, so through the upper decks of the Arena ran a sprawling system of cables and pulleys that held aloft a million square feet of oiled sailcloth, and on windy days the groaning of this rigging rivaled the bloodthirsty cries of the hockey fanatics.

Tonight however the sails were furled, as the rains which had lingered through most of the day had at last tapered off, although the granite underfoot was still slick as Captain Venatore and his rookie officer pushed their way through the crowds milling about the Arena’s several broad arched entrances in search of nonexistent tickets for a game that had sold out weeks in advance.

“Any match between United and the Blues is going to be a hot item,” Venatore muttered as he used a cudgel to gently but firmly keep would-be spectators from choking off the canalside entirely. “But with your boys playing the way they’ve been playing this year, every Blues game is its own disaster waiting to happen. Surely you heard about what happened up in Stabientia.”

Petracchio nodded, though at this point there probably wasn’t a soul in Varo who hadn’t heard about the riot between fans of the Blues and those of the Orangemen visiting from Orsilia. The Captain gave a slow-moving drunkard a hard shove and continued:

“Not that I like to slag on my fellow Greenheads, but Stabientia should never have let the situation get as out of hand as it did in the first place. Your team starts winning, though, and you start feeling a little punchy along with the rest of your fellow Canalsiders. Look at me, rookie- I bleed hockey. You don’t think I don’t understand?

“But if you don’t keep these jokers on a short leash, it’ll come back to haunt you. Big time. Take this group of good for nothings, for example.”

Ventatore gesticulated to a group of young Varonian boys passing an amphora of wine back and forth between them while making drunkenly clumsy overtures to female passersby who lacked the good sense to avoid the Arena at night and anyone else who strayed into their field of general derision. The Captain strode right up to the loudest of the youths, who sported a maroon robe and a pair of Marine combat boots that had clearly never seen an honest day’s march. The boy had close-cropped black hair that was already streaked with white despite his young age and a mouthful of teeth in worse shape than most of the hockey crusaders who were able to do battle in the Arena.

As the Greenhead drew near the other young toughs hooted and jeered.
Captain Venatore sized up the lot of them with one eye and scanned the crowd for additional troublemakers with the other. “Good evening, boys. Nice night to see the Blues bleed red all over United ice, wouldn’t you say?”

The lead youth mumbled something and his companions muttered their assent, but Venatore continued to draw near, sniffing the air as he did so. “Have you been drinking, son? You don’t look old enough to me.”

The kid in the maroon robes looked at the Captain with an expression of boozy indifference. “I’m sorry, officer. Is there a certain age that you’re supposed to be? Because nobody told me.”

“Cute,” Venatore said. “So you’re a poet now, are you?”

Petracchio could sense the growing menace in his commanding officer’s voice, but even if they did as well the gang of toughs ignored it. The rookie braced himself for another ugly scene and wondered how many teeth the punk in maroon would be left with at the end of this conversation.

Venatore’s nose twitched again, then his eyes narrowed. “Say, aren’t you Brindisi’s kid?”

The boy went white as a sheet, and even his friends had suddenly stopped tittering as they had all along up until this point. “Y-yes, sir.”

“Well that would explain why you’re not afraid of the law, wouldn’t it?” The Captain turned his head slightly as he explained to Petracchio. “A Senator’s son, slumming it in Lowtown like he’s some kind of gangster.”

The rookie took a closer look at the young tough in maroon. Under several layers of carefully contrived artifice he now saw the imperious jaw of the boy’s father, the unmistakable streak of white in his youthful sideburns. Senator Brindisi was one of the junior members of Varo’s senior legislative body, and as a result was still obliged to show his face around the City; still Petracchio marveled that Venatore was able to pick out the resemblance so quickly. The Captain turned back towards the kid:

“It would also explain why you’re dumb as a post, son. No disrespect to your old man, but he doesn’t understand Lowtown worth a damn. Every time he visits he brings physicians, grammar teachers, and all other manners of busybodies from the four corners of the Three Continents- not to mention his good for nothing do-gooder wife. If it even possible, she’s worse than he is- she wants to save us from ourselves. As if being a Lowtowner were some kind of curable disease.

“But if that were true, then why are you here then- hmm? All dressed up like you’re about to go throw down with the Delts or the Taciti. You think I don’t know about these dirty canals just because I wear the green?”

Venatore leapt forward and seized the boy’s hand as he rolled up his own sleeve with his other. There on the Captain’s forearm was a series of brands: a sequence of bars and dots that identified Giro as a member of one of Lowtown’s myriad gangs. Petracchio hadn’t seen enough of these markings to know which combination signified which crew, but from the way that the Senator’s son recoiled and tried to escape the Captain’s grip it was a fair guess that he immediately recognized the brandings.

As the young tough wrenched this way and that in vain hopes of extricating himself Venatore seemed to loom over the kid like an avatar of some ancient forgotten god.
“I grew up here, boy. Born and bred in the insulae. Killed my first man at twelve, and it only got worse from there. If I hadn’t seen the light and changed my ways I’d be stringing you and your wannabe gang right now up like so much Shan-li streetmeat. Capisce?”

Terrified, the young tough could only gulp his assent.

“Good,” the Captain said, letting go of the boy. “Now get the Hells out of my parish. All of you.”

Only several steps away did the maroon-clad poseur regain some measure of his equilibrium. “Y-you aren’t going to tell my father, are you?”

Venatore snorted at this as if this were one of the funniest things he’d heard in ages. “Are you kidding me? That’ll just send the whole lot of them down here again on a new damned fool crusade. But if I ever see you or any of your friends hanging ‘round here again I’ll hogtie and carry the lot of you back up the Rock. Am I clear?”

The group of young toughs dispersed into the night like small fry in the presence of a shark, causing the Captain to laugh out loud. He reached down to pick up the hastily-abandoned amphora and gave it a tentative sniff before taking a quaff. “Not bad. Have a taste, rookie.”

Petracchio barely had time to react as his commanding officer casually tossed the large earthenware vessel at him. He caught it on the bobble, sloshing some of the red liquid onto the granite.

“Careful now, that’s probably Senator Brindisi’s private reserve!” As the rookie stole a mouthful of wine, the Captain scuffed at the spill with the heel of his boot and spat. “Kids. They grow up hearing all about the gangs of Lowtown and come here in droves, like the fucking Southlanders on the ferries but in reverse. Most of the shit that gets out of hand down here is the result of these idiots trying to prove themselves.”

Petracchio reflexively touched his swollen eye and Venatore sighed. “All right, I said most of it. Some of our problems are of our own making, I’m not too proud to admit. You want to tell me what happened now?”

The two Greenheads nursed the amphora of wine—which was a rare vintage indeed—and the junior officer narrated the events that transpired on his stoop while Venatore listened with an impassive yet attentive expression on his face. When Petracchio finished the Captain thought for a few minutes before speaking.

“I was hoping that finding that Oguntak floating in the Secundo didn’t mean we were in for a full-blown shitstorm, but hope’s for suckers. I’m sorry that Old Man Esposito decided to take this out on you, though.”

“Take what out?” Petracchio groaned. “I still don’t understand what’s going on.”

“That savage boy wasn’t just some drug pusher that got lucky. He was part of Esposito’s organization.”

The rookie lowered the amphora and fixed Venatore with a hard stare. “How do you know this?”

The Captain met Petracchio’s gaze and did not so much as flinch. “Because I asked him, that’s how! You think I’m going to let him beat one of my men senseless without some kind of reckoning?”

The junior Greenhead said nothing because that’s exactly what he’d thought, and both of them knew it. Venatore sighed a second time, as exasperated as he was disappointed. “Look here, rookie. I know you think I’m dirty as a turd, but Lowtown is not like other—“

“—not like other parishes.” Petracchio cut off his Captain with a ferocity that surprised even himself. “Yes, you’ve told me this ten thousand times over the past twenty-four hours. And you know what? I’m even willing to believe you if you answer me just one thing- right here and right now.”

Captain Venatore looked at his new rookie with a raised eyebrow. “And that is…?”

“What made you see the light?”

“Como?”

“When you were setting that Brinidisi kid straight you said you ran with the Lowtown gangs until you saw the light. Tell me what happened.”

“Fair enough, rookie.” Venatore took the amphora back from Petracchio and drank deep, sucking down what remained of the wine, then flinging the lees into the black waters of the nearby canal. “I was part of the Delts. And if you think they’re hellraisers now you should have seen us some thirty years ago. Even the Gentle Don knew better than to fuck with our crew. We claimed all of the tenements between the Secundo and the Porphyry Gate and may the One True God help you if you challenged us. We lived like kings- we took whatever we wanted and didn’t give two shits about anything but our own here and now.

“Then she came into my life. Her name was Terzia and she was the most beautiful girl I’d ever laid eyes on. It was here at the Arena where I first met her- I was roughhousing with some of my fellow Delts and literally ran right into her, spilling her wine all over her dress.”

“Oh, how mad she was!” The Captain smiled at the memory. “Although my boys made themselves scarce as soon as she started with the tongue-lashing, I stayed and took it as best I could. It’s not that I’d never been yelled at like that by a woman before—my mother screamed herself into an early grave on my account—but for some reason I had been struck dumb by this young lady, and she with me. If I need to tell you what happened next, then you’re quite beyond my help, rookie.”

Although Petracchio laughed at this, Venatore’s mirth had faded. “She never told me that her older brother ran with the Taciti. Someone must have seen us together that night and dropped a cyp on us. My own boys thrashed me to within an inch of my life when I got back to the insulae that night, but what the Taciti did to her…” The Captain look away and shook his head.

“That was it for me. I’m no saint, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to be just another monster. I may not have been able to do anything to save poor Terzia, but everything I do along these filthy canals is for her. Capisce?”

Petracchio nodded.

“Good. Now let’s get some answers. I think I know just where to look.”

The ancient sandstone of the Arena rang with countless footfalls as ten of thousands of Canalsiders poured over its wide concourses and up and down the stairs of each terrace, and even though the match had not started, the cheers of so many blue or red-clad hockey fanatics already amount to a dull omnipresent roar. The Captain and his rookie threaded their way through the knots of pushcart food vendors and wine queues, forsaking the ramparts of the home team for the quarter of the venue that had been cordoned off for the visiting Blues. Two dozen Greenhead auxiliaries held the line between the red and blue jerseys, truncheons in hand and riot shields raised; Venatore gave the cops a mock salute as they opened their ranks to allow him and Petracchio to pass into Stabientia’s territory.

The most fanatical of the Blues were singing one of their traditional fight songs in an attempt to rouse the remainder of their ranks, such that Venatore needed to shout to his partner as they pressed through the heaving mass of rowdy drunkenness. “Remember my friend Fouad and his brother the ‘used’ lacquer dealer? Something about that ’21 Magliozzi he was bragging about being able to get ahold of rang a bell. Turns out our midnight swimmer had been seen tooling around the canals of Lowtown in just such a gondola.

“This is where things get interesting- the owner of this vintage piece of lacquer is a woman who goes by the name of Evangelina. We don’t know much about her, except that she’s supposed to be the girlfriend of one Francesco Sabatini.”

Petracchio felt his heart leap to his throat. Sabatini wasn’t just another thug from the Varonian underworld, and from the way that Captain Venatore looked at his junior officer he seemed to know this already. “Captain Seraf told me that you and Sabatini used to work for the same crew, back in the day. Is that right, son?”

The rookie gulped and nodded, uncertain of what would come next. While he had been candid with his former Captain about his past, he had not expected that Serafinelli would have necessarily shared this information with other Greenheads. But what had he said, the other day? ‘This may be the end of line here, but I’m still a copper. And coppers talk.’ What sort of punishment had he merited by withholding this information? Petracchio tensed as he prepared for his commanding officer’s wrath, only to be surprised as Venatore clapped him on the shoulder and laughed.

“I’d be a fine example to judge you for your prior misdeeds, wouldn’t I? Listen to me, and listen to me good: your past is a foreign country, rookie. Forget what the storytellers say- a hero in my ledger-book is someone who knows from first-hand experience how easy it is to do the wrong thing and chooses the right thing anyway. Capisce?”

“Yes, sir.” Petracchio tried not to let his voice choke up when he said this, though it was clear that he was grateful for his boss’ words.

The Captain continued: “Good. Then I don’t want to know about who you were and what you did, because as soon as you put that green helmet on your head it didn’t matter . What I need to know, though, is that I can rely on you. Tell me something, rookie- if the trail leads all the way back to Sabatini, is this going to present a problem?”

The junior Greenhead smiled grimly. “No, sir. Not in a slightest.”

Francesco Sabatini held court at the center of the visiting bleachers like a Korumani emperor, surrounded by concentric rings of azure-shirted Blues fanatics and neckless goons dressed all in black. As Captain Venatore and his junior Greenhead approached the outer perimeter of Sabatini’s domain the senior officer gave the Ogrish bruiser who intercepted them a shit-eating grin and a flash of his badge.

“We just want to ask your boss a few questions- that okay with you, Tiny?”

The ogre looked at Venatore like something he’d stepped on outside of the Arena, but allowed the two to pass without a word. The Captain chuckled and the rookie quietly exhaled.

“The bastard has nowhere to run here, and he knows it. If we had tried his nightclub he’d have every right to keep us waiting on his doorstep, and never mind that it’s significantly out of our jurisdiction to boot. Here he can make himself as comfortable as he likes, but he’s still on our turf.”

Petracchio now understood why Venatore had been so keen on taking tonight’s police detail at the Arena. He tried not to shrink under the murderous stares of Sabatini’s crew, who even though the match had started did not allow themselves to be distracted from protecting their damin. Or was there something more to it? Petracchio noticed some hurried movement as the Greenheads approached- the flash of silver and the quick staccato of a woman’s heels on the granite bleachers.

“Relax, rookie- she’s not going anywhere.” Venatore whispered through a smile. “I’ve got Aemilia and Stefano staking out her lacquer. Now let’s see what Damin Francesco has to say for himself…

“Buona sera, Signore. Nice night to watch the Blues’ winning streak come to an end, wouldn’t you say?”

Francesco Sabatini remained seated, the velvet folds of his dark purple robe as unruffled as his oleaginous and jet black hair. The damin looked at the two Greenheads with a bemused expression that amateurs often confused with good humor before hard experience taught them otherwise.

“Don’t bet on it, copper. The Blues are going all the way this year- wouldn’t you agree, Petrarch?”

The rookie tried to affect as flat a tone as he could muster. “Hello, Francesco.”

Sabatini gave Petracchio a mock wince as he stared at his face. “I see police work suits you just about as well as working for Arlix did.”

Petracchio knew that his old compatriot was trying to rattle him, but after his conversation with Venatore he felt fortified for this encounter. “It’s a day’s work. Honest or dishonest, you should try it sometime.”

The damin’s lip curled, but before he could answer the insult in turn Captain Venatore interrupted him:

“If it’s a dick-swinging contest you want, I’m afraid both of you lost when you walked into Lowtown. So enough of that already- I want you to tell me what you know about Esanga the Traitor.”

Sabatini looked at Venatore with a blank expression. “And who, pray tell, is that?”

The Captain just laughed at this, then suddenly brought his boot down squarely on the damin’s softly-shod foot with such force that it could have split stone. As Sabatini yelped in pain and his bodyguards scrambled, the veteran Greenhead grabbed a fistful of purple velvet in one hand and held a knife to the man’s throat. “Right, then. Unless you want the closest shave of your life, I suggest you tell your boys to stand down. Capsice?”

Francesco Sabatini cocked his head ever so slightly to signal his assent, and the thugs in black who had encircled them took a step back. “Keep an eye on them, rookie. If anyone so much as coughs, put a crossbow bolt in their forehead.”

Petracchio nodded, his service-issued bow already leveled at Sabatini’s men, although he couldn’t help but remember how his Captain had warned him how unreliable the weapon actually was. Still, it was the threat of using it that mattered right now- the rookie just hoped that no one would put it to the test.

“You’ve got a lot of nerve, Captain.” Sabatini growled from under Venatore’s knife.
“So I’ve been told. Now, let’s try this one more time. Esanga. Talk.”

The match had now begun in earnest, which meant that save for this small knot of conflict all other eyes were now on the ice and Petracchio could barely make out the conversation between Venatore and Sabatini.over the roar of the crowd. Still, the rookie heard the damin utter a name that was unfamiliar to him, then another that he couldn’t possibly mistake for another. The Captain nodded at Sabatini’s sudden candor, withdrawing his knife and relaxing his grip on the underworld boss.

As luck would have it, one of the thugs in black interpreted this action as the perfect opportunity to do something stupid and lunged towards the Captain. Venatore whirled, slicing one of the man’s fingers off with a flash of Cebalese steel, but another of the neckless bodyguards took advantage of the sudden chaos and approached from behind the veteran Greenhead. Petracchio aimed his crossbow and pulled the trigger, only to have the weapon jerk uncontrollably in his hands as the tension wire snapped and flew into another goon’s face, causing him to double over in a bloodied mess.

Then the rookie felt thick fists and heavily-shod feet pummeling his already bruised body—the crush of blows swallowed him in an undifferentiated mass of moving limbs and flashes of agony. He could no longer see his Captain, or Sabatini for that matter, and Petracchio struggled in vain to drop his crossbow and draw his broadsword before giving up on the action and simply wielding the broken weapon as a makeshift club. The heavy stock of the bow proved surprisingly effective against his opponents, and with each swing he managed to push Sabatini’s bodyguards further and further away until at last he was able to catch sight of Venatore again. The Captain was pinned between a couple of Cebalese toughs while the ogre whom they had first breezed past struck him repeatedly with his oversized fists. Each blow landed with a meaty slap and sickening crunch that Petracchio could hear even over the cacophony of the fight and the general din of the hockey game. Sabatini was nowhere to be found now, the rookie noticed.

It would be just a matter of seconds before the auxiliaries holding the line between the Reds and the Blues would get word of the fight and rush to their aid, but Petracchio knew in his gut that even that was too much time to wait. He needed to think of something, or both he and his new Captain would be dead.

Inspiration came in the form of a song. Almost before he could walk, the junior Greenhead had learned all of Stabientia’s fight songs, courtesy of his father and uncles, who lived and died by the Blues and took great delight in leading the cheers of the faithful. In time Petracchio had joined their ranks, and his booming baritone soon became a regular feature of any home game. There were one or two songs, however, that even the most diehard of Blues fanatics dared not sing these days- these were the fight songs of old, when spectators came to a match as armed as their team and all the more willing to spill the blood of their enemies. Just humming a few bars could get you in trouble with the local constables, lest the ancient melodies stir up a murderous atmosphere.

The rookie chose one of the worst songs of all, a battle cry that his relatives would sing after the last keg had been tapped back in Mack the Greevy’s clubhouse at the foot of Stabientia’s terraced Hill. It was a blood-boiling rhyme questioning the lineage of the Blues’ opponents in general and calling out other teams in particular. Petracchio skipped right to the verse about Lowtown United fans, which began with a string of Old Varonian expletives that he bellowed at the top of his lungs so loudly that even the ogre lowered his fist in surprise, giving the Captain the opportunity to wriggle free of the Cebalese muscle holding his arms. With a swift jab of the pommel of his broadsword he broke the jaw of one, then brought the blade around to connect with the other’s upper thigh, causing the thug to collapse into a puddle of his own dark blood.

Venatore grabbed his junior officer’s arm and shouted: “We need to get out of here- pronto!” The rookie needed no encouragement. For not only had the ogre collected its wits and was moving to engage the two Greenheads, but Petracchio’s fight song had begun to spread through the knot of embattled Blues fans like sparks through dry kindling. If they were lucky, the auxiliaries would smother the potential riot before it exploded into something uncontrollable, but given the passions on hand at the Arena this evening it was anyone’s guess as to what would happen next.

The Captain and Petracchio fell back just as the auxiliaries charged the visitors’ bleachers, cutting off Sabatini’s ogre behind a wall of truncheons and full-body riot shields; when the two had finally reached the relative safety of the concourse, Venatore spat out a fragment of broken tooth and scowled at the fracas unfolding in the stands through a bloodied brow.

“That was a damned fool thing you did there, rookie. Stupid but brilliant. In all my years I never thought I’d be so happy to hear that accursed song! Just promise me that you will never, ever sing it again in my presence.”

Petracchio grinned. “Gladly, sir.”

“All in one piece, are you?”

The rookie tried not to think of what else might be broken, fractured, or contused at this point. “I think so, Cap.”

“Right, then—let’s go see what Stefano and Aemilia have for us.” Captain Venatore began to lumber towards the nearest ramp back down the outer perimeter of the Arena, but stopped once he noticed that Petracchio was not following him.

“Sir.”

“What is it, rookie?”

“Your conversation with Sabatini.”

Venatore scowled and spit out another fragment of tooth.

“What did he tell you, exactly?”

“Nothing I didn’t already suspect. Satisfied?”

Petracchio had always considered himself an excellent judge of when a person was being less than truthful with him, but his new Captain was proving difficult to read. The rookie wondered if he was really that perceptive after all, or whether he had simply been enjoying the luxury of a world where making such determinations was an easy thing. He nodded to Venatore and fell in behind him on the way to the private enclosed marina that served as a parking lot for the more well-heeled spectators’ lacquer.

Gondoliers lounged idly next to their gently bobbing skiffs, either drinking Salumar coffee or taking long drags of Voordian weed from their long clay pipes. As the Greenheads approached, they collectively shrunk away with lowered voices and eyes averted; after a few more steps the Captain and Petracchio realized why- on one of the quays lay Stefano, his gangly limbs sprawled and twitching.

Venatore cursed and looked around. “Where the Hells is Aemilia?”

“Sir,” a voice gasped from the dark waters of the marina. Aemilia was dog-paddling back towards the moorings, and the Captain snatched a punt from one of the taciturn gondoliers to help fish her out of the drink. As she dripped oily canal water onto the pavement, she made her report.

“The girl got the drop on us. Hit Stefano with some kind of paralytic dart from a hand crossbow, then bull-rushed me into the water. I managed to hang on to the till of her Magliozzi ‘til she gave me a rap on the head.”

It was at this moment that Venatore and Petracchio realized that Aemilia’s scalp was sticky and still oozing dark blood. The Greenhead seemed somewhat unsteady on her feet all of a sudden, and as she staggered her comrades propped her up. She looked at her Captain with a glazed expression, then mumbled: “Sorry, sir.”

Before Venatore had the opportunity to complain, Aemilia was no longer conscious.

TO BE CONTINUED...

Chapter Eight: Rookie (Part One)

2010-07-20T11:40:00.000-07:00

(Note: This installment of Varonian Nights will be posted in four separate parts, as the entire short story is just shy of 28,000 words! Stay tuned for Part Two on Friday.)

“Tell me something, rookie- do you believe in God?”

Petracchio blinked. Of the all the questions he had prepared himself to answer today, this was not one of them- he’d heard that the Captain Girolamo Venatore was a tough bastard, but no one had mentioned anything about theology. He stared at the veteran Greenhead across the massive hardwood desk, searching his new captain’s face for some hint of a smile, but Venatore looked at him with eyes as sharp and gray as slate and a strong jaw that seemed permanently set into an expression of disgust. At a loss as to how even to begin to answer such a query, Petracchio hoped that perhaps he’d heard the man wrong.

“Sir?”

Captain Venatore leaned forward in his chair, his great slab of a body causing the cheap rattan to creak ominously. “Did I stutter? I said, are you a religious man, Petrrachio?”

The rookie shifted in his own chair and quickly looked away from his new boss’ gaze, which seemed as though it could pierce a curtain of Eieronian lead, focusing instead on a sunbeam that had broken through the clouds to cast a panel of amber on the dirty whitewashed wall. Somewhere in the distance Petracchio could hear a church tower tolling Seventh Bell, the customary start of the night watch for the Varonian police. As myriad Canalsiders made their way home through a City of congested waterways and footpaths, their day’s toil finally at an end, the work of Varo’s Greenheads was only just getting started.

Still uncertain as to how to respond to Venatore, Petracchio mumbled something noncommittal about the importance of faith. The Captain grunted. “My dear departed mother always wanted me to be a priest. ‘Giro,’ she said. ‘You were meant to do God’s work. Never forget that, my boy.’ She never forgave me for joining the force, but then again she never understood.”

“Understood what, sir?” Petracchio braved those hard eyes again, which blazed with a cold fire as the Captain answered him.

“That God doesn’t give a fuck about us, rookie. Maybe a long time ago he cared, but have you seen any evidence of his handiwork around these parts recently? Because I sure as Seven haven’t. The City is a cesspool, and the only thing that keeps the million poor bastards that live here in line is this.”

Captain Venatore produced his leather truncheon and shook it for emphasis. “This is God’s work, Petracchio. Because the law is all we have, and we are its avenging angels. Understand this and you just might survive. Capisce?”

Petracchio nodded.

“Good.” The veteran Greenhead leaned back in his chair, propping his feet up on the desktop. Petracchio looked at the bottom of the Captain’s boots—he recognized them as Marine-issue and well worn, the soles having no doubt been reshod many times over the years. “So, Captain Serafinelli speaks highly of you.”

“You know Cap’n Seraf?”

“He and I go way back.” Venatore leaned forward suddenly and pointed a calloused index finger at his new recruit. “That’s your second lesson, rookie: never burn your bridges. Because even in a City with over a hundred parishes you can only outrun your reputation for so long. This may be the end of line here, but I’m still a copper. And coppers talk.

“No offense to your former boss, but Caecilia’s a cakewalk compared to the Lowtown. We get more murders here than the bored housewives get hangnails there.”

Petracchio cleared his throat. “I know, sir. That’s why I requested to be sent here.”

“Is that right!” The captain snorted. “Now why would anyone in his right mind ask to work in this godforsaken precinct?”

“I wanted to go someplace where I could make a difference.”

Venatore considered this for a moment. “Nobles words, rookie—I’ll grant you that much. Tell you what: why don’t you survive the night first, and then you and I will talk about whether it’s possible for even a Greenhead to make a difference in a world like ours?

“For now, though, welcome to the Lowtown beat.”

---

In the strictest sense, Lowtown is not one parish but five. As wave after wave of immigrants washed into the City they tended to settle in these first residential neighborhoods just across the Secundo so as to be adjacent to their work in the labyrinth of wharves and warehouses of Terminalia, slowly but surely displacing all but the most stubborn of Old Varonians who once called these parishes home and transforming their Canalside stoops to a jumble of mud and brick tenements that were as tall as they were structurally unsound.

“The joke is that the insulae of Lowtown are the tallest buildings in Varo,” Captain Venatore remarked as he walked briskly along the granite quay just outside the ramshackle portico of the precinct house. The veteran was a good head taller than Petracchio, so keeping up with the big man’s stride had already given him shin splints. The two Greenheads were fighting against the evening commute, when both the canals and the footpaths were choked with humanity either coming or going to another day of work, be it honest or otherwise.

Petracchio tried to make sense of the babble of languages and the colorful clash of exotic dress against the dark and subdued Varonian sartorial palette, the smell of tens of thousands of people pressed so close to one another that you didn’t smell them so much as tasted their sweat, the fires of their kitchens, even the shit they dumped from their chamberpots. The rookie tried not to choke while his captain weaved in and out of traffic and kept on talking:

“Never mind that the walls are so thin that a crossbow bolt will pass through an entire block if it goes astray. The cittadini are supposed to keep the slumlords from skimping on the mortar, but most of them never even set foot here during their entire term of office. Why bother when you can sell your votes just as easily from your apartment in the Old Quarter? If I had my say, I’d force those bastards to help us dig the bodies out when one of these things collapses. Nasty business-- it may not keep them from taking bribes, but pulling a couple of dead babies out of the rubble while their mothers stood by shrieking would sure as Seven give them nightmares for years to come.

“Speaking of crossbows, don’t even think of using the one we issued you-- it’s a piece of shit, like everything else in Lowtown. A long time ago some genius decided that we’d be better off with one big police force instead of five parish precincts. Since you can’t tell where one parish ends and another begins down here, I suppose it makes some sense, but instead of giving us five times the budget we now have to beg the Doge just to make payroll.”

Venatore turned and grinned manically at this. “Still glad you gave up the walled gardens of Caecilia?”

Before Petracchio could make an answer both Greenheads heard a series of shouts echoing through one of the tenements. “Right, off we go!”

The Captain grabbed his truncheon and started loping towards the din, with his new junior officer right on his heels. After passing through a curtain of wet laundry hanging low on a tangle of lines along a narrow corridor the two burst into the middle of a curious standoff on the closest stoop: a cluster of ruffians from the Great Lakes were harassing a column of pygmies who were evidently on their way home from a long shift manning the bilge pumps somewhere underneath the City. The Lakers, practically red-faced from their bluster and cheap hooch, were shouting obscenities at the diminutive Southlanders, who despite their weary resignation had their hands on their daggers.

The Captain quickly interposed himself between the two parties. “Now what seems to be the trouble this evening? Don’t tell me the Ka Raz Rii tried to eat your dog again, Seamus!”

The largest of the Laker contingent—a pasty, flabby giant with a filthy mane of red and a nose like a pink cauliflower—shuffled forward while his drunken comrades collectively took a step back. “Captain Venatore! So nice to see you, as always. To what do we owe the pleasure of your visit this evening?”

No sooner did Seamus finish his question than the Captain kick him in the groin, causing the Laker to double over in agony. Petracchio started to open his mouth in protest, but Venatore silenced him with a murderous glare before sapping the prone giant in the kidney with his truncheon while his companions looked on from a safe distance. “How many times have I told you to leave these savages alone? I thought they were the ones who didn’t understand Varonian, not you!”

The Laker rolled over onto his back, coughing up blood and spittle. Venatore scowled at him and kicked him in the ribs hard enough to produce a sickening crack as his steel toed booted connected with the ruffian’s body. “Go fuck yourself, copper!”

“Wrong answer, Seamus.” Captain Venatore landed a blow with his truncheon square in the Laker’s face, causing his fat nose to explode in a bloody mess. He kicked the giant a second time in the ribcage, then stomped on one of his hands for good measure. “Let’s try this again, shall we? What do you say to the nice little headhunters—“

“S…. s… sorry,” Seamus burbled through his own gore.

Another stomp, then the veteran captain grabbed the Laker by a greasy braid of hair. “I didn’t quite hear that, Seamus.”

“I said sorry, damn you, sorry!”

Venatore dropped Seamus’ head back onto the dirty granite of the courtyard with a heavy wet thud. “There, was that so hard? Now get out of my sight, the lot of you! And if I hear so much as a peep coming from this neighborhood again, I’m holding you personally responsible Seamus—whether you had anything to do with it or not. Capisce?”

Seamus merely groaned. The Captain spat on the Laker’s still-prone form, then turned to the pygmies, who were waving their arms in alien gestures of gratitude. Venatore nodded at the lot of them as they continued on their way home. “Poor bastards. Spend two thirds of your life underground keeping some damin’s villa from sinkning under the weight of its own shit, just to come home to this.

“I hate the Lakers, Petracchio. How many people come and go through Lowtown on their way to bigger and better things, while these lazy sons of bitches have wallowed here for centuries? Watch, the cannibals and their kids will be sitting pretty on top of Hightown long before Seamus and his countrymen ever even sober up. The only thing a Laker is good for is the Three-Man Court, and even then half the time he’s dogging it.”

Petracchio, still agape from the Captain’s sudden violent outburst, remained silent. Venatore regarded his partner with equals parts pity and contempt. “I told you this wasn’t like police work in the other parishes, rookie. Scum like Seamus understand only one thing. You hesitate in a situation like that and you might as well slit your own throat. Do I make myself clear?”

The junior Greenhead nodded and Captain Venatore smiled. “Excellent. Let’s see what else the night has in store for us then.”

The two continued their rounds, occasionally stopping either at someone’s behest or on the Captain’s hunch- here a domestic dispute, there someone to complain of a thieving neighbor. Venatore seemed to have a preternatural sense of where to find the next spot of trouble, and as Petracchio struggled to keep up his partner rattled off a constant stream of equal parts commentary and advice:

“Always separate a couple for the night if they’re having a spat. Do whatever you have to do, just make sure they’re not sleeping under the same roof before you leave unless you want to arrest one of them for murder the next morning. And while I’m thinking about it, never underestimate a woman’s ability to throw an axe—especially if they come from Skraelingia.

“You ever police a Cherin community before? Try not to freak out when you see all the blood, because it’s a religious thing. Except when it’s not. Good luck figuring out which is which!

“The Old Varonians like to think they’re their own law here, which is all well and good until they take it upon themselves to kill a Southlander because he squats when he pees or wears a mask in public. Don’t let them intimidate you, but at the same time don’t be stupid. Capisce?

“Every gondola for sale in Lowtown is either stolen or about to be stolen. Don’t believe anything the driver tells you. Even when he has papers, that just means he’s guilty of theft and forgery. The good news is that almost every booted piece of lacquer goes through the same fence, and he and I go way back.

“The Widow Romeo will offer you dinner if you’re on a call in her neighborhood. Regardless of whether or not you’ve already eaten, always say yes. Not only is she a veritable fountain of Canalside gossip, but I would literally kill a man for a bowl of her lamb stew. Do not, however, let her set you up on a date with any of her granddaughters. Just trust me on this one.

“Fucking Lakers. Don’t get me started on them again!”

So the night passed, and just as Petracchio felt he was getting a handle on the rhythm of the Lowtown beat he and Venatore were summoned to a tenement on the rough and tumble westernmost reaches of the precinct, where a naked man was allegedly running around with a sword. The two Greenheads cased the empty courtyard of the insula where the perpetrator had last been seen and were just about to give up on the search when the man leapt out from the shadows, sweeping Venatore aside with a strength well beyond his own wiry frame and knocking the rookie prone.

Petracchio had just enough time to look up at his assailant, who was wild-eyed and encrusted with filth from naked head to naked toe, as he raised the massive claymore above his head. So much for surviving the first night, he thought to himself, but even as he prepared himself for the killing blow to split his skull the junior officer watched the wild man suddenly go cross-eyed then limp, his great sword clattering to the pavement next to him as he collapsed under a well placed sap from the Captain. Venatore offered Petracchio a helping hand, then scowled at the unconscious form at their feet.

“Help me lift this guy, rookie. Saint Cyril’s is just beyond the next juncture.”

“Wait,” Petracchio roused himself from his near-death experience. “We’re not going to arrest him?”

The Captain pointed at the naked man’s left arm, where just visible through a layer of dirt and who knows what else Petracchio could make out a tattoo of Old Varonian numbers. Their assailant was a former Marine.

“Another vet strung out on El Mirad,” Venatore says shaking his head. “You ever serve, son?”

“Deltaine. I was in the 23rd.”

Captain Venatore’s eyes widened, and if the rookie didn’t know any better he could have sworn that his partner was looking at him with an expression of genuine respect. “You boys saw sone real action.”

Petraachio nodded but did not elaborate. If the Captain already knew about the 23rd Legion, then he would have also known that the Marines who lead the invasion of Deltaine usually had no desire to talk about what they’d experienced. “How about you, sir?”

“Ryzien. Another shit war.” This was of course an understatement. The siege of Ryzien loomed large in every Canalsider’s imagination, a vicious deadlock between the City and one of her colonies that only ended when the Senate and People if Varo authorized the death of every man, woman, and child on that accursed island. “I’m not going to say I slept so much as a wink for years afterwords, but at least we didn’t come home addicted to combat drugs like you lot.”

Petracchio grunted as he shouldered the stinking dead weight of the unconscious Marine and he and Venatore made their way to the tiny shrine of the One True God. The Captain also groaned, not so much from exertion on his muscles than the assault on his olfactory senses. “If nothing else, the nuns will give him a bath and a hot breakfast. I wish there were more we could do, but there aren’t enough hours in the day.”

Venatore looked at his junior officer, who seemed in a kind of daze. Petracchio’s mind was still back in the courtyard, where he’d been a split second away from a grisly demise. The Captain, sensing this, gave his partner a thump on the shoulder as they exited the shrine.

“Come on, rookie. Let’s get some hot coffee in you. I know just the place… if you have a cast-iron stomach!”

The place in question was a barge owned by an enterprising Salumar named Fouad, who realized that the most valuable real estate in Lowtown was on the water itself, as it was only a matter of time before anything built amidst the tenements was either burglarized or burned to the ground. Fouad’s Famous Floating All-in-One was well-protected from either such fate, however, and its proprietor had become a kind of folk hero for his success, even if his coffee was in fact as awful as Venatore had promised. Nevertheless the Eastern Salu’s viscous tarlike brew was exactly what Petracchio needed to extricate himself from the state of shock that their encounter with the veteran had put him in, so he quaffed demitasse after demitasse with a gracious smile that was only half-forced while his new Captain bantered with the barge owner.

“Fouad, will you kindly inform your brother that if I catch him trying to sell one of his pathetic excuses for a gondola as a classic piece of lacquer again, I’m going to personally wring his scrawny neck like a chicken. I mean, shady deals are one thing, but passing one of his dinghies as a '99 Santarpio? That’s sacrilege.”

The corpulent proprietor grinned at the Greenheads seated on stools that ringed the perimeter of the barge as he danced about the floating All-in-One’s interior, which was piled high with all manners of dry goods in between the simmering cauldrons that heated the massive samovar of Salumar coffee and kept a selection of curries and porridges warm for early breakfasters. Enticed by the smell, Petracchio had almost ordered a bowl of curry before Venatore advised him against it (“Stick to the coffee, rookie, unless you fancy spending the rest of your shift crapping your guts out.”)
As Fouad’s coffee revived his spirits, the rookie marveled at the large man’s ability flit from patron to patron wearing heavy flowing robes and more jewelry than a Senator’s wife or a courtesan.

“Izmir, he is only my half-brother. But I swear, Mister Captain Venatore, the lacquer is the genuine article! Only a few scuffs above the waterline.”

The Captain shook his head and chuckled, then explained to his junior officer. “Fouad and Izmir are the kingpins of the ‘used’ gondola trade here in Lowtown. There isn’t a stolen piece of lacquer in this neck of the woods that doesn’t pass through their curry-stained paws.”

Petracchio nodded at this uncertaintly. “So why not bust them?”

“Because there isn’t a stolen piece of lacquer in this neck of the woods that doesn’t pass through them. Capisce? If I send these gentlemen to Egg Rock there’ll still be a stolen gondola market, only I won’t have my finger on its pulse anymore. Besides, Fouad and his brother are aware of the fact that I allow them to ply their trade and return the favor with information I wouldn’t otherwise be able to obtain.”

Venatore paused here for some hint of acknowledgement from his new partner, but Petracchio sat in silence and stared at his coffee. Exasperated, the Captain sighed.

“I told you that the Lowtown beat was nothing like Caecilia. Most of the time the worst thing you can do is make the collar, because all you’re doing is trading in a known quantity for something unpredictable. Now don’t get me wrong—there’s scum and then there’s scum—but come down here thinking you’re going to clean things up and all you’ll do is muddy the waters.”

“So what are we doing here, then?” Petracchio asked.

Before Captain Venatore had a chance to answer him the two were joined suddenly by two other Greenheads- a tall, lanky man with a very large crossbow slung over his shoulder and a woman with closely cropped black hair. The officers seemed to have been looking for Venatore, who regarded their approach with a cocked eyebrow.

“So what do we have tonight?”

The woman responded, glancing first at the rookie. “Midnight swimmer.”

“Joy!” The Captain exclaimed. “And here I thought you were going to make it through your first shift without any corpses turning up. So much for your good luck, rookie. Ser Petracchio, meet my senior officers- the good-looking one is Aemilia, the sociopath with the catapult on his back is Stefano.”

Petracchio nodded at the two Greenheads, who shrugged in return. After all, how many rookies had they seen come and go, he wondered? The Captain looked at Aemilia and detected more than a hint of impatience with the customary pleasantries of greeting a new officer. “Out with it, Mil. Why did you interrupt our well-deserved coffee break with something you two could have handled on your own?”

Aemilia cleared his throat. “Sir, we found him floating in the Secundo.”

Venatore cursed. “Why didn’t you say that when you got here? Right. Break time’s over, rookie.” The Captain flipped a few cyps onto the counter of the Salumar’s barge and grabbed Petracchio by the elbow as he disembarked onto the granite quay, his partner following uncertainly.

“The Secundo is the boundary between Lowtown and Terminalia,” the Captain explained as he lengthened his stride so as almost to break into a run. “That means the SPQVs will try to meddle in the investigation if they get wind of it.”

The SPQVs! Varo’s ultimate arbiters of business and contract law, the SPQVs were responsible for administering justice in the parish of Terminalia, which owing to its official lack of a permanent residential populace did not fall under the Doge’s parochial mandate. “Jurisdiction is a nightmare,” Aemilia added as she and Petracchio fell in behind the Captain’s flowing Ferrari drag while Stefano brought up the rear. “The SPQVs can tie up a criminal case for weeks or even months if they decide there’s a commercial angle.”

“Terminalia’s a great place to dump a body,” the Captain said over his shoulder. “But forget to pay the person who helped you carry it and suddenly you’re up to your eyeballs in grey velvet. Speaking of which…”

As the veteran Greenhead’s mutterings trailed off into a stream of profanity Petracchio could make out a trio of grey-clad individuals standing at the next junction—two men and a woman—observing the efforts of a couple of police auxiliaries and several passersby to fish what Aemilia had labeled the “midnight swimmer” out of the murky depths of the Secundo Canal.

From personal experience Petracchio knew that hauling a dead body from the water was much more difficult than it seemed, especially if the corpse had been in the drink for any appreciable length of time. One the one hand the oily effluvia of industrial runoff made anything that fell into the canals slippery as a tuna, while the natural process of decay rendered the body soft and disturbingly fragile to the touch. It was clear that the auxiliaries had already tried and failed to retrieve the corpse, but just as the four Greenhead officers converged on the scene a bargeman had managed to gaffe the body securely enough that the others were able to lift it out of the water and land it on the cold granite quay like a big fish.

“Careful there, Inspector Pomilio!” Venatore called out to one of the SQPVs. “You don’t want to get anything on those nice shoes of yours.”

The dark-haired SPQV with a silver chain and medallion around his neck—signifying that he was the ranking agent of the three-- answered in the same mocking tone.

“Well, if it isn’t Captain Venatore—late to the crime scene as always! What’s wrong, Giro, all those curry buns taking their toll?”

“Fuck off. Rookie, meet Inspector Pomilio, perennial boil on my ass. He’s what passes for a competent investigator among the SPQVs. Pomilio, meet Petracchio, the rookie.”

“Piacere,” Petracchio said.

Inspector Pomilio extended a hand to the junior Greenhead; Petracchio could feel the agent sizing him up as they shook, as if solely by the grip of a man’s hand the SPQV could measure his worth. Despite a youthful appearance and relatively fashionable style of couture Pomilio must have been similar in age to Captain Venatore, though clearly the former had aged significantly better than the latter. The Inspector’s bright eyes sparkled in a way that made even his crows’ feet seem charming.

“Likewise.” He gestured towards the other two figures in grey—one a youngish Canalsider with an overly ambitious attempt at facial hair, the other slightly older and darker in complexion whose head was shaven in the style of Egrezi Ra. “These are agents Maximilio and Ren.”

“This is Petracchio’s first day on the Lowtown beat, so go easy on him, Pomilio, will ya?”

“Better watch yourself, son. Your Captain goes through rookies like the United go through goalies.”

“Don’t let him bait you with hockey talk,” Venatore growled. “He’s a fan of the best team that SPQV money can buy!”

Pomilio smirked. “You’re just sore that your boys got beat. What was the score again last night? I lost count. You a fan of the sport, rookie?”

Petracchio cleared his throat. “I’ve followed the Blues since I was a kid, sir.”

“Oho!" The SPQV almost whooped. “You sure know how to pick ‘em, Venatore. Another glutton for punishment. Not that the Blues aren’t making a run of it this year, but every winning streak has its end."

While the playful banter went on like this the auxiliaries continued to manhandle the waterlogged corpse until they’d deposited it between the cluster of Greenheads and SPQVs. The deceased was a dark-ski nned man with neither a hair on his head or a stitch of clothing on his body, save for a bone-white mask that was only slightly askew. As Petracchio looked at the dead Southlander’s covered face he was vaguely aware that something about this wasn’t quite right, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on what it was.

“Oguntak,” Captain Venatore muttered. “Probably gang-related. These guys kill each other as a way of saying hello. I swear, it’s as if each ferry boat brings people even more backwards than the last batch. One day it’s pygmies, another its these bloody savages. At this point we might as well just pack it in and move the whole City to the jungle!

“Sorry you came all this way for nothing, Inspector Pomilio, but I don’t see why the SPQVs need bother to involve themselves in this case.”

Pomilio did not respond to the Captain, as he was looking at the junior officer, whose eyes were still fixed on the Oguntak’s blank mask. Again his eyes twinkled as he addressed Petracchio. “Is that your assessment, son?”

The rookie gulped as he realized that all eyes were on him. “I, I... I don’t think this was a gangland killing.”

The lead SPQV raised an eyebrow while Venatore broadcasted all manners of obscenity with a curled lip. “Care to elaborate?”

“It’s the mask, sir. When an Oguntak kills another, he takes the mask as a prize.”

“Maybe he forgot,” Venatore muttered in a tone of voice that implied that he strongly suggested that Petracchio make this his own opinion as well, but the rookie either missed the cue or was too nervous to understand it for what it was.

“Someone stripped this guy naked, but forgot to remove his mask? Doesn’t seem terribly likely.”
“I am inclined to agree,” Pomilio said. “Excellent observation, rookie. What did you say your name was again?”

“Petracchio. Ser Petracchio.”

The SPQV agent’s eyes narrowed for a moment. “Talent like yours is wasted on the Greenheads, Petracchio. If you ever feel like making a real difference, talk to me. In the meantime—“

Inspector Pomilio’s demeanor changed suddenly as he returned his attention to Venatore. “By the authority of the Senate and People of Varo I am declaring this a joint investigation. You know the drill, Captain—I expect daily reports from your team, and we will of course reciprocate. Are we clear?”

Captain Venatore grumbled something inarticulate that sounded more like something about Pomilio’s mother than his assent. Irritated by this, the SPQV raised his voice: “I didn’t hear you, Captain.”

“We’re clear, Inspector.” Petracchio realized that his Captain wasn’t glaring at Pomilio but directly at him.

Pomilio smiled mirthlessly. “Excellent. Then if you’ll excuse me, I’m needed elsewhere. I’ll expect your preliminary findings by the Third Bell later this morning. A pleasure meeting you again, Petracchio. Good luck making it through the rest of your shift!”

With that the SPQV agents disappeared, as if their black velvet garment had simply melted into the night, leaving the quartet of Greenheads and the dead Oguntak. Sensing that he had committed a grave breach of protocol, Petracchio tried to squeak out an apology before his Captain could lay into him:

“Sir, disculpa me—“

What the rookie hadn’t expected, however, was Captain Venatore’s right hook, which connected squarely with his chest, knocking the wind out of him. As Petracchio sank to his knees the veteran Greenhead loomed over him, his face contorted with rage.

“That’s for aiding and abetting the enemy. Do you know how hard it is to shake the SQPVs loose, once they’ve invited themselves into an investigation? Well, you’re about to find out, rookie. I’m making you our liaison, which means you’ll be pulling double duty until this case is closed. Next time keep your observations between you and your partner. Capisce?”

Gasping for breath, the rookie nodded. “I’m sorry, Captain.”

For some reason Petracchio’s contrition only seemed to enrage Venatore further, who roughly hauled his fellow officer to his feet only to pitch him into the oily dark waters of the Secundo. Petracchio flailed against the weight of his gear and looked up at his Captain, who regarded him now with an expression of disgust.

“Never apologize, rookie! Time enough to be sorry when you’re dead.”

Venatore stalked away from the granite quay, leaving his new partner to struggle out of the drink on his own. After his fingers failed to find any purchase on the wet stone a few times he was hoisted from the canal by Stefano, who had a rueful smile on his face. “You think that was bad? You should have seen my first day.”
Aemilia guffawed at this, suggesting that her own experience had been no less traumatic.

“Consider yourself lucky, paisan!”

TO BE CONTINUED...

Chapter Seven: Tourist

2010-05-02T14:02:00.000-07:00

Evangelina did not remember a time when she wasn’t running away-- from something, from someone, from herself even. Her flight had started at an early age. Long before she had actually left home her soul was ten thousand miles away, and her hapless parents could do little but watch as her body caught up and both were gone forever. Had the girl had a troubled childhood perhaps they would have felt some measure of guilt for what had happened, but in fact Evangelina’s adolescence had been unusually idyllic for any era. No, hers was a wanderlust that was born, not bred - Evangelina ran as if she were a tourist to her own life, and woe be to anyone who made the mistake of enjoying her company long enough to care.

It was a humid night in the City, one of those evenings that couldn’t decide whether to smother the metropolis in fog until dawn or come down all at once in a violent deluge. With a million souls’ company to keep these nights were a special kind of torture to some, but not to Evangelina. Varo was a sweaty, tangled mess of humanity, and she loved it. Dressed in a thin white chiton that clung to her form like the mists on the dark waters, Evangelina tilled her gondola with an expert hand. The ’21 Magliozzi cut through the night, its sleek black lacquered hull finding the most effortless route through the labyrinth of canals that comprised the Three Parishes neighborhood as if it had a guiding spirit of its own.

Perhaps it did, Evangelina thought to herself, recalling the gondolier who had once plied this boat for a living until he’d met her. Julio had trusted her, and she had rewarded his faith with death. Did he curse her name at the end, Evangelina wondered, or did he ever even know? Forgive me, Julio.

She had told her that the boy’s death was necessary- regrettable, yes, but necessary. But didn’t she always say that? At least Sabatini killed for anger, for spite, for pleasure. Evangelina could understand such motivations even as she abhorred them, because even at their most monstrous they were those of a human being. Whereas with her… Despite the warm pressing murk of the night, Evangelina shuddered.

Briefly she thought about the troubleshooter from Dandolo, who sought solace in the absence of his fellow man. Evangelina was his polar opposite. Only when she was so completely enmeshed in the company of others did she find some measure of respite from thoughts such as these. How long would it be until this boy’s “regrettable but necessary” death as well? Try as she might to comfort herself, Evangelina always fell short on her own. This is why she pushed the gondola through the night, following the distant throb of drums that drew her as inevitably as the trickster moon pulled the tides. As the beat grew louder, Evangelina could feel her own pulse quicken, as if her heart were changing time to match the rhythm.

Where the Three Parishes converge is an unlikely void in the fabric of the City’s dense weave: Norollo. A long time ago here an entire neighborhood stood against the might of the Senate and People of Varo for a cause long forgotten, and paid for their arrogance down to the very last man, woman, and child. In the heart of a city without so much as a square yard for the dead lay a cemetery for a parish that not even the most jaded Canalsider dare profane by attempting to resettle - and yet it was this dead heart that pulsed at night, with drums that echoed through the empty piazzas and laughter that defied the silence. Here were the great dance halls of the Oguntak, where death was not shunned by revelers but invited as a welcome guest.

As her gondola crossed the old parochial boundary into Norollo, Evangelina felt the thrill of being a stranger in a foreign country. While this was by no means a rare occurrence in a city that was home to myriad immigrants, the Southlanders had created more than a mere enclave. It was as if the Oguntak had taken a piece of the Third Continent and grafted it whole onto Varo. The dance halls along the River of Palms, where the living reveled amid the remains of their ancestors, were once the stuff of legend – though the tides of war had swept them forever from their native land the children of Ogumi had resurrected them here, drawing Oguntak and Canalsider alike.

Evangelina allowed herself to be guided by the drums, which now pulsed so loudly that it was a wonder that the entire City didn’t hear them, and soon the hulking skeletons of Norollo’s architecture began to emerge from the fog-shrouded gloom. While many the old tenements lay bare and decrepid, some of the buildings were festooned with hanging lanterns and full of revelers. Every night that she came here Evangelina could swear that the drums and dancing had spread to another abandoned apartment block, spilled over into another formerly lifeless piazza. The drums were now almost deafening, but still she poled the Magliozzi further into Norollo, allowing herself to be drawn deeper and deeper into the pounding rhythm.

At the epicenter of this throbbing hum was Jasper’s, or at least a place that was once called Jasper’s who knows how many years ago-- for although the proprietor was doubtless long since dead, the sign still hung over the entrance to his establishment painted in tall black glyphs that seemed to pierce through the humid air and stand out in ebony contrast against the night itself. Had Jasper’s been a restaurant? A nightclub? Or perhaps a brothel? To be honest no one knew, and more to the point no one cared. Jasper’s was simply the place to be, and Evangelina was as powerless to resist this call as the others who had gathered here to crowd the gilded halls and dance until the first light of dawn.

A masked Oguntak man helped Evangelina from her gondola and secured her boat. Normally she worried about leaving such expensive lacquer in the care of a stranger, but here she knew that no one would dare try to steal it. To the children of Ogumi this was sacred ground-- when the Oguntak Nation crumbled and disintegrated the refugees of her terrible civil war had brought naught but the bones of their ancestors, which now lay interred throughout this dead parish. No Southlander would dare profane such a place, nor permit a Northlander to do so either out of ignorance or arrogance. Evangelina nodded to the tribesman, whose mask was as impassive as the marble bust of a Senator, and waded through the undulating wall of humanity that thronged Jasper’s front door. The drumming now shook her every last bone, and as she crossed the threshold she at last surrendered to it and allowed her body to move to its beat.

---

Esanga watched the crowd from behind a bone-white mask. Jasper’s was filled to bursting this evening- there was something about the humid evening air that invited company, and even though the young tribesman did not dance, he felt the compulsion as well nonetheless. From his vantage point atop an ancient balcony Esanga could see the entire ground floor of the building, and as he sipped from his goblet of palm wine he marveled at all of the Northlanders who had come to revel alongside his countrymen. By the light of day a Canalsider would not be caught dead with the Savages of the Third Continent, and yet here those same Varonians were here tonight in droves.

Was is the cover of darkness that made this intermingling acceptable, or was it something deeper? Esanga wondered if the drums themselves had a kind of magic over the human soul, such that regardless of one’s birthplace the rhythm beguiled a man or woman and overran their prejudices, even if only for a fleeting moment. There was a time when the Oguntak boy had believed that this City was a place where all things were possible- here on the dance floor of Jasper’s Esanga could pretend that this was still so, even though he now knew better.

Over the pulsating din of a hundred Southlander drums Esanga heard a woman’s voice, one that he had heard countless times here in the dance halls of Norollo. Clear and resonant, it embroidered a simple melody that wove effortlessly through the guttural cries that emanated from the rest of the crowd and leaped about the drummers’ rhythm as if in counterpoint. She was here. Despite himself, Esanga smiled and gestured for more wine.

She had been coming for weeks now, Esanga noticed-- always arriving alone, always leaving alone. Hers was the black lacquer gondola moored in Jasper’s floating garage, a Magliozzi with deep purple upholstery and the unmistakable scars of several crossbow bolts above the waterline. How did a girl who couldn’t be more than twenty years of age come to possess such a dangerous ride; and how did she learn to sing so sweetly, yet so powerfully that hers seemed the only voice in a room full of noise? The Oguntak stared at the crowd massed on the floor of the dance hall until he could make her out, as if he were willing the girl to well up from the tangled mass of limbs. There she was, eyes closed, in a white chiton that her sweat had reduced to little more than a diaphanous glaze, her body swaying as her fellow revelers swelled around her.

As Esanga listened, he pretended that the girl was singing to him and to him alone, her wordless melody resolving itself into lyrics about heartbreak and lost love. Was it his imagination, or did her song seem to match the sad tune in his soul? It was at that moment that he realized that her eyes were open, and she was looking right at him. Surprised, the Oguntak shrunk behind his mask and quickly looked away, but when his gaze returned to the floor of the dance hall she was still watching him, a faint smile on her lips as she sang.

It was all of the invitation that Esanga needed. Leaving his refilled goblet of wine untouched he descended from the balcony and crossed the vast foyer of Jasper’s slowly but deliberately. He moved with a certainty that half-dared the girl to change her mind and melt back into the crowd as quickly as she had appeared, but as he drew nearer she stood her ground, her melody looping around him as he approached and beckoning him even closer. Esanga’s pulse quickened as he beheld her up close for the first time, so close now that he could see the individual beads of sweat glimmer on her skin like tiny little diamonds. He stepped forward so that there was no one between them now, and as he made his move the girl accepted the Oguntak’s advance and filled what remained of the intervening space with her own body.

---

Evangelina had felt his eyes alight upon her long before she even saw him. The man in the bone-white mask always found her when she came to dance at Jasper’s. He, too, was invariably by himself, perched on the old night club’s mezzanine like a predator. She wondered why an Oguntak would wear the simple unadorned mask of an uninitiated tribesman, and why the other Southlanders gave him a wide berth. It was not as if his kinsmen shunned him, though, so much as they seemed to fear him. Briefly she had considered asking one of the clubgoers about this mysterious individual, but she suspected that no one would talk to some Canalsider girl playing tourist for the evening. Besides, there was no need for such amateur sleuthing- he would come to her. Didn’t they always?

Still, she was surprised when the Oguntak finally did decide to make his move. Evangelina had so thoroughly settled into the waiting game and looked forward to teasing her anonymous masked admirer from afar that even though she knew that such delicious tension would have to break at some point she was almost sad that this part of the dance had to end. What inevitably followed was less magical than the initial promise, and always ended in heartache and ruin. So why persist? Once Evangelina had been able to convince herself that it was hope of something better, but deep down she knew the real reason now: the rush of each new love was too much to forego. To her it was more powerful than the purest El Mirad, and after several false starts and missed connections she was craving another fix.

The Oguntak may very well have been her age, although he stood a good foot and a half taller. Most of the Southlandish races tended to be shorter than their fellow humans dwelling north of the Great Locks, but the Children of Ogumi were as tall and thickly built as Cherin. Only whereas the latter were pale in complexion, the Oguntak had skin as dark as cacao. As Evangelina brushed up against her partner on the dance floor she drank in his form as greedily as she would drink a bowl of Palmlands chocolate; from behind his bone-white mask she could see that he was doing the same.

---

Esanga was no longer aware of his actions, the girl’s proximity having banished all conscious thought to some forgotten corner of his mind. As he had approached her across the ancient marble flagstones of Jasper’s, he kept expecting her to disappear like some kind of trick of the heat, but instead with each step she became even more tangible, and even more beautiful. When he was no more than a few paces away the Oguntak found that his heart was actually racing. What sort of enchantment was this! Esanga was no stranger to love, but he had closed his heart to such things- hadn’t he? The crowd parted as he moved forward, as if they too had caught scent of this powerful attraction and dared not get in its way. The Southlander knew that some of his kin scattered for a different reason, but at the moment this concerned him not at all. Only she did. She and she alone.

---

A slow, broad smile formed on her lips as she continued to sing, her voice playfully weaving in and out of the rhythm of the drums. A classically-trained vocalist, as a girl Evangelina had escaped her tutor in Egrezi Ra at every available opportunity to sing with the gypsies who inhabited E-Ra’s nameless ghettoes. Refugees from Shaqaara, that land where newborn babes either carry a tune or are left out to die by remorseless parents, the nomads taught her more about, they taught her that music was much more than the stuff of practicing scales and singing recitatives from ancient operettas.

In the Shaqaaran ghettos Evangelina learned to live and breathe music, and here amidst the dance halls of Dead Town she lived and breathed once more. In this place every beat and every note flowed effortlessly onto the hips and lips of myriad revelers, charging the humid air with an irresistible frenzy. Her Oguntak admirer was caught up in this divine madness as well, his movements matching hers with a fluid grace that pleased her to no end. Their bodies were one now, sweat and hot skin commingling as they discovered each other’s proximity. Evangelina closed her eyes and thrilled at his touch.

No sooner had she given herself entirely to the moment and surrendered to the intimacy of this private dance, however, than her partner suddenly stopped moving. Evangelina snapped her eyes open- they had been surrounded by a knot of Oguntak tribesmen and tough-looking Canalsiders who neither danced nor smiled. One of the Southlanders held an obsidian-studded club, whereas the humorless Varonians flashed the deadly hint of steel ready to be unsheathed.

Under her breath she cursed, and was surprised to notice that her companion did the same. For an instant they looked into each other’s eyes and saw a flicker of recognition-- a mirror image of two lost souls that had spent so much of their lives running away from one thing or another that they expected trouble to catch up with them whenever they allowed themselves the luxury to remain in one place for too long.

The Oguntak with the club broke their reverie with a bark from behind his ornate mask, which was painted to resemble the sleek features of an ocelot- the tribesman’s voice carried over the din of the reverlers still oblivious to the situation unfolding in their midst:

“You do not belong here.”

For a moment Evangelina felt her heart sink, and her already-flushed skin turned even more red. Never had she been made to feel like an interloper here in Norollo, but under this Oguntak’s stony gaze she felt her confidence wither. It wasn’t until her companion responded that she realized that the tribesman had not been addressing her at all:

“That is a bold assertion,” he said in a voice as resonant as a kettle drum and surprisingly confident for a man who was facing down half a dozen men with nothing but his fists. Evangelina had never heard him speak before, and despite the tension of the moment couldn’t help but savor her partner’s rich baritone. “Who are you to decide such things?”

The ocelot-masked Oguntak clearly did not like having his opinions questioned. “You are no child of Ogumi- you are Esanga the traitor!”

Evangelina was close enough to feel her companion stiffen at this challenge, but he did not betray his reaction to this knot of young toughs. Already the drumming had ceased on the dance floor of Jasper’s as a crowd quickly gathered to witness the altercation. Over the spreading silence Esanga chuckled from behind his bone-white mask.

“You seem to know well enough who I was, but tell me this: do you know who I am now?”

“What kind of riddle is that supposed to be?” The club-wielding Oguntak tried to maintain his bravado, but Esanga’s mirth was tinged with a menace as sharp as an obsidian blade.

“No riddles, friend. Just a simple question.”

“You are no friend of mine!” the young child of Ogumi spat as fiercely as he could. “So why don’t you and your Varna whore leave this place before we—“

The Oguntak’s threat was cut short as Evangelina’s right foot connected with his throat, the sharp-heeled sandal causing the boy to double over choking on his own blood. Before the others had time to react Esanga had grabbed the studded war club and whirled the Southlander weapon with an expert hand, cutting the legs out from under one of the Canalsiders and slicing open the dark belly of another tribesman.

As a neckless Varonian produced a hand crossbow out from underneath his Ferrari drag, Esanga saw the flash of steel out of the corner of his eye as Evangelina whipped a knife through the air and deep into the would-be bowman’s forearm. The Varonian thug dropped his weapon and howled in pain just as Esanga smacked him across the face with the flat of the club, knocking him unconscious.

The remaining two toughs looked at each other and scattered in opposite directions, leaving their friends to bleed on the dance floor. Evangelina and Esanga looked at each other as well, full of adrenaline and mutual wonder. “Where were you keeping that knife?” Esanga asked his erstwhile dance and fighting partner; Evangelina said nothing, only smiling in response.

Esanga stood over the crumpled body of the ocelot-masked Oguntak and said derisively, “You would have done best to leave the lady out of it! Now take back your insult and I will spare your worthless life.”

“Go to hell,” the young tribesman gurgled. Esanga shrugged and raised the war club to strike a killing blow but his hand was stayed by Evangelina’s arm.

“He’s not worth it,” she said. But Esanga had already checked his swing, his attention suddenly riveted to Evangelina’s armband. As he stared at the white gold serpent entwined around her arm, he realized who this mysterious girl was. His blood lust now dissipated, he contented himself with a parting kick to the boy’s ribs and headed for the exit of the dance hall.

“Wait!” Evangelina ran to catch up with Esanga, pushing through the crowd of onlookers who were already in the process of returning to their general merrymaking as the drums resumed their beat. “Where are you going?”

But it was no use. By the time she reached the threshold of Jasper’s the white-masked Oguntak was already gone, disappeared into the dark, humid gloom as sure as a bead of onyx dropped into a pool of black ink. Flustered, Evangelina sat on the ruined marble steps, utterly at a loss. Why did he run away? she thought to herself.

That’s my job.

---

Many are the Queens of Chocolate, but among the Gorgons of the Southlands there is one who will always reign supreme in the hearts of mortals and immortals alike: Cariebasa. So great was her name that even after she was deposed by her daughter people dared not speak her name for fear of retribution. When the tumultuous end of the Crusade turned the Third Continent upside-down and embroiled its myriad tribes in genocide and bloody civil wars, Queen Cariebasa disappeared entirely from the Palmlands to find refuge on the shores of Varo.

In this way, the medusa was no different from the millions of souls that had come before her, each of them arriving on the grand quays of Terminalia to reinvent themselves and be born anew- though few immigrants had come to the City with the pomp and circumstance as she did. Twenty years ago the Queen’s royal barge proceeded up the Grand Canal in an impromptu fiesta sufficiently grand that Canalsiders still speak fondly of the Gorgon’s largesse. If they had known that Cariebasa had spent her very last denar on this spectacle would they have thought less of her, or more?

Even before she gave up her kingdom for permanent exile, Queen Cariebasa had always loved the City. Few Gorgons had ever dared show their veiled faces north of the Great Locks, but Cariebasa traveled extensively throughout this hemisphere. Millennia ago the Salumar had ushered in a new era here in the Northlands - though their cities had crumbled under the might of the Raynar Horde, their legacy endured, giving birth to a generation of men who feared neither gods nor monsters. As these new tribes of Mankind spread throughout the Three Continents the Gorgon Queen did not despair, but reveled in the advance of civilization even as it encircled her domain and threatened to eclipse it altogether.

The Age of Monsters is coming to a close, her kin had warned time and time again. The Age of Man is nigh. But Cariebasa would always laugh at this- for what was Man, but the greatest of all monsters? As the epicenter of this new monstrous age, Varo drew the medusa like a moth to the flame, and here amid the suffering of a million souls she was more at home than she had ever felt in the Palmlands.

Few Canalsides dared so much as to skirt the parishes of Lowtown, for fear of being ensnared by a towering labyrinth of shantytowns that was as lawless as it was squalid. To the average Varonian these slums were no less remote a place than the very heart of the Third Continent itself, such that even missionaries from the Church of the One True God would not venture inside without an armed escort of Marines. The Gorgon Queen had just finished entertaining such a delegation of priests and concerned citizens – usually the wives of Senators or Great House scions who were motivated more out of boredom than a genuine concern for their fellow human beings.

But she was not fooled, for couldn’t she smell the adrenaline rush of each party and taste their panic as the human walls of Lowtown swallowed the sun? Canalsiders were by no means unaccustomed to living in close quarters, but even they had their limits. If Varo was the dream of a better life, Lowtown was the nightmare of that promise belied, where failed dreams were piled upon one another like bulk freight along a Terminalia wharf. Of all of the City’s secrets, this was perhaps her most sordid- that of all the treasures she imported from the far corners of the Three Continents, Varo’s chief commodity was the broken soul, and Lowtown was its emporio.

There were other visitors as well, of course- those who braved the Southlander slums so that they may rewarded with a glimpse of the Gorgon Queen herself. Tourists, Cariebasa always called them, but in truth most of them were pilgrims. Though it is by all accounts the most godless place on earth, Varonians nevertheless revere more gods than all of the nations of mankind combined, as each wave of immigrants brought its native pantheons and household gods along with them. Canalsiders brought even more distant gods home in the holds of their far traders, either as curiosities or trophies of hitherto undiscovered markets.

The Queen had come to the City with little more than the asps on her head, but she was never truly destitute. Long before any Gorgon had set foot in Varo those who venerated them as living goddesses had established themselves in various Southlander enclaves. The most populous of these was the Parish of the Serpents, a sprawling block of massive ramshackle tenements in Lowtown named after that most famous city along the Great River where the Gorgons still held sway. Here amid the slums the devout had built a temple to the medusae, and it was from here that Cariebasa had started her life anew, holding court with those who still respected her and accepting the offerings of those who still adored her—or feared her.

The Gorgon Queen could always smell Evangelina before she saw or heard her. Cariebasa delighted in her scent- the girl’s sweat was sweet like tears, and unlike many mortals she tended to eschew the heavy perfumes of Salumaria or the stong scented oils that were currently in vogue in the Varonian bathhouses. This morning however Evangelina smelled of jasmine soap and the unmistakable odor of another.

“I’m late,” the girl apologized before Cariebasa had a chance to accuse her. She was still wearing the white chiton from the previous day- it smelled of jasmine and her overnight liaison. It was a man’s scent- a Southlander’s scent.

“Is that so?” Cariebasa sniffed. “I hadn’t noticed.”

“Disculpa me,” Evangelina said. It was not her way to apologize for anything, but she suddenly felt foolish about the events of the previous night. She knew that if Cariebasa were to ask her about what she’d done, and with whom, she’d feel compelled to tell her the truth, but the Gorgon Queen seemed to avoid the subject altogether. This made the girl feel even more foolish, as she knew Cariebasa could smell the Oguntak boy as surely as if he had been standing in their midst.

However embarrassing a prospect, full disclosure of her adventures seemed less excruciating than knowing that she knew and saying nothing at all. But this is exactly how Cariebasa operated. For all of her reputation as a sorceress most of her power came from understanding one’s hidden motivations and exploiting them. Magic was too unpredictable, she was always fond of telling Evangelina, whereas the faults of the human soul were as inevitable as they were manifest. Although the girl could not see the medusa’s face, she could imagine the cocked eyebrow and the sly smile as she haltingly began her confession.

“Forgive me, my Lady. But I met someone.”

---

Evangelina sat crumpled on the steps of the club for a few minutes before she realized that someone was watching her from the darkness. She narrowed her eyes in a vain attempt to penetrate the predawn gloom. “Who’s out there?”

“Your dance partner.”

Although her heart skipped a beat at hearing his voice once more, Evangelina drew herself into a defensive crouch. “Why did you leave?”

The Oguntak boy remained in the darkness. “Because I know who you belong to.”

“You are afraid of someone like Francesco Sabatini?” she snorted.

“Not Sabatini,” Esanga replied. He stepped out of the shadows suddenly and grasped her by the wrist, just above the serpent of white gold that encircled her forearm.

Evangelina’s eyes widened. “How?”

The Oguntak’s voice belied the smile beneath his mask. “You know who I am, but do you know who I was?”

The girl laughed. “Another riddle!”

“I am no stranger to the Queens of Chocolate.” Esanga said, pausing as if by even referring to them so obliquely he had invited their wrath. Not only were the Gorgons of the Palmlands powerful sorceresses, but they were as vain as they were paranoid as well. In his native land a man could find his tongue cursed for speaking in such a manner, but here the City and its million souls seemed to be its own world, one that defied the god of the Three Continents and their magics.

“Then you know the name of the one whom I serve.”

“Well enough to know not to speak it aloud!”

Evangelina smiled, her dark eyes catching the phosphorescent glow of Norollo’s lanterns like twin mirrors of polished onyx. “Those thugs- they called you a traitor. What did they mean?”

“We all make choices,” the Oguntak replied cryptically. “Some haunt us forever.”

Evangelina’s “So why did you come back then?”

“Because some things are worth the risk.”

Whether the Oguntak boy was brave or very, very foolish, she was thoroughly captivated by him at the moment, so much so that she didn’t care what happened next. Let the consequences of the morning sort themselves, she thought to herself. The night is ours.

“Want to go for a ride?”

The Oguntak boy sat in silence as Evangelina guided the Magliozzi along a tidal rip. It was no more than an hour before dawn, but the air was so thick that the darkness still held sway over the City’s canals. Varo had precious few moments when a gondola built for speed could have its run of the waterways, and Esanga could almost feel the black lacquer pulse with exultation as it cut a course through the emptiness.

“This is my favorite time of the night,” Evangelina said, as much to the night itself than to him.

Esanga trailed his fingers in the dark water and nodded his assent. “Mine as well.”

The girl slowed her pace, allowing the gondola to drift for a moment. “Do you know this place?”

The Oguntak blinked at the gloom that enveloped them. He noticed that the dark had intensified, as if the girl had driven them back towards midnight again. The air had cooled suddenly as well, just as it does when the sea air overruns the westerly breezes from the mainland. “No.”

“This is Zeferrelli’s Leap,” Evangelina explained. “Legend has it that it is here that Enrico Zeferrelli journeyed to the land of the dead to bring his lover back from the dead.”

As Esanga’s eyes adjusted to the gloom he could sense the walls of rock encircling them and the unusual motion of the waters here. Absent also was the scent of brine. The girl continued:

“There’s a freshwater spring below us. People believe that it is the mouth of one of the rivers in the Underworld.”

The masked tribesman turned to her. “Do you believe this?”

Evangelina met Esanga’s gaze. “No. I have no time for fairy tales.”

“Then why did you bring me here?”

Evangelina smiled wickedly. Esanga, understanding the girl’s intentions, drew closer as the gondola drifted in a slow circle on the upwelling spring. Evangelina barely had enough sense left in her to secure the Magliozzi’s punt before he was on her, his dark hands finding the soft curves under her chiton. She reached up to touch his mask, stroking the alabaster smoothness as if it were a part of his body.

“Shall I take it off?” Esanga whispered.

Evangelina shook her head, then kissed him gently. He laughed and grasped her by her hair with one hand as he pulled her even closer with the other.

---

“Tell me, child.” Cariebasa gently interrupted her thrall’s recounting of her liaison. “Did the Southlander’s mask have a seam running down the middle, as if it had been broken in half and mended.”

Evangelina’s embarrassed contrition turned to absolute surprise. “How- how did you know?”

“It does not matter. But you must promise me that you will never see this man again.”

“Why?” Few would dare question the motivations of a Gorgon Queen, but Evangelina’s voice was almost defiant.

Cariebasa hissed. “Promise me!”

“I promise.” Although Evangelina said it in a way that even almost convinced herself, she knew better.

So did Cariebasa.

---

Another night in Norollo, another night at Jasper’s. There are those who lived for another night on the dance floor in Varo’s dead heart, those who stumbled home at dawn only to rise again at dusk. In other lands these people would be viewed with suspicion at best or outright hostile at worst- ghouls, they would be called. Zombies. Vampires. But here they were no more unusual than bakers or cobblers. In a city of million souls, nothing was out of the ordinary- not even a girl punting her own lacquer, and a beautiful girl at that.

Evangelina knew what she was doing. She knew that he’d be here, just as he always was, and that by coming here she was defying Queen Cariebasa, something that she had never done before. Until him.

Esanga was sitting in his customary position on the balcony of Jasper’s when she arrived. She pretended not to notice him pretending not to notice her, with the result that both of them broke into a smile at the same time. Instead of waiting for the Oguntak to come down to her this time, however, Evangelina confidently strode up the broad marble steps. Although the way was littered with the semi-recumbent forms of revelers taking a break from the neverending dance, enough people remembered the previous night’s fracas to make way for the girl who’d put her left heel into a young tough’s neck.

She found a goblet of palm wine set out for her on the table when she arrived at the top of the stairs, opposite Esanga’s. The boy had savored every step of Evangelina’s walk up to the balcony, and now that she was right in front of him she could feel how ravenous his eyes were. She, too, looked at his dark frame with a hunger that had only seemed inflamed by their lovemaking the night before and not in the slightest bit sated. Esanga gestured to her to sit, but Evangelina remained standing instead.

“Who are you?”

The masked tribesman did not so much as blink at this, but merely repeated his gesture to her. Evangelina, undaunted, continued:

“You heard me. Tell me who you are-- not who you were or who you will be!”

Esanga chuckled grimly. “So she would not tell you herself?”

Silence.

“She told me to stay away from you. That is all.”

“And yet you are here. Why?”

Evangelina smiled. “Because some things are worth the risk.”

The Oguntak boy grinned so that Evangelina could see it even from behind his mask. “I will tell you anything you want to know, signora, but answer me this: does any of it really matter?”

“No.”

“Then let’s dance.” Esanga rose from his seat and offered her his hand; she took it and the two descended the stairs to the floor of Jasper’s, their palm wine untouched.
They both knew she was lying, that it did matter. But not here. Here in Norollo the only thing that mattered was the rhythm of the drums, the heat of each other’s body, the thrill of the anonymous present which defied the foreign country that was the past and the inevitable final destination of the future. Outside of Jasper’s they were victims of their own circumstances, scraps of plot in a drama that existed long before them and would outlive both, but here they were nothing more than strangers to their own lives. And tonight no one would dare interrupt their dance.

---

Cariebasa was alone. Surrounded by humanity, the Gorgon Queen should have felt the crush of their numbers, the heat of their warm bodies, the smell of their hope, the taste of their fear, the rhythm of their desire. But instead she felt nothing but her own longing. Lowtown was usually a whirlwind of sensation, but to Cariebasa it had become a whirlpool of emptiness, the epicenter of a void that had engulfed her suddenly and threatened to consume the whole world.

She was losing her. The Queen of course had known that it would only be a matter of time before this happened. It was the girl’s nature to run, and despite the temporary respite that Cariebasa had offered her it would take more than sorcery to keep Evangelina in one place for too long, despite her own protestations to the contrary. When she swore that she’d stay with her forever the Gorgon Queen smiled beneath her veil, for she knew better than to trust the fickle hearts of mortals. But like the fool she was, Cariebasa let herself be worn down by this girl’s charms and let herself pretend that despite all that had gone before,despite all of the evidence to the contrary, this one would not leave her.

But in the end, they all left—didn’t they?

She had gone to him again, had spent the night with him. Cariebasa could smell her treachery coming from a mile away-- the immaculate stink of that Ogutnak boy was overwhelming, as if it were now the only scent in the entire City. The girl made no attempt to hide this second liaison, however, and no sooner had she ascended the stairway into the tenement cum makeshift temple than she began the accusations.

“You were the one who tried to kill him, weren’t you?”

“I did not know that you—“

Evangelina did not let the Queen finish her weak protest. “Liar! You’ve been having me followed all this time, haven’t you?”

“How could you accuse me of such a thing?”

“The Southlanders who attacked us- the mask he wore was that of an ocelot. I didn’t remember where I had seen that mask before. Now I do!”

The girl stalked down the hallway until she came to a row of artwork that hung as offerings to the living goddess- here there were Varonian busts, Salumar tapestries, even the flayed tattooed skins of Cherindaal’s most devoted, but chief among the totems were Southlander adornments and countless Oguntak masks. Before Cariebasa could stop her Evangelina plucked the ocelot mask from the wall and brandished it at the Gorgon Queen as it were a weapon.

“You knew,” the girl said, still in disbelief. “You always knew.”

“You do not understand.”

“What is there to understand-- that nothing you’ve told me is the truth? “

“Truth!” Cariebasa struggled to control her anger. “What is truth, child? One could sooner capture a thunderstorm in a clay pot than discover the truth of any matter.”

“Now you sound like a Shan-li fortune cookie.”

“You humans,” the Gorgon hissed, displeased with Evangelina’s mockery. “Always obsessed with simple answers- like children.”

The girl matched ire with ire. “Is that all I am, then? A child! You did not treat me like a child in your bedchambers.”

“Enough.” Only too late did Cariebasa realize that she had pushed her too far. But the Gorgon had crossed a threshold beyond which there was no return.

“You do not own me,” Evangelina took a step towards the medusa, who actually recoiled at this. “You do not command me. You are not my Queen- I am not your subject. I thought I was something more to you.”

Cariebasa sensed the girl’s resolve wavering, but when she extended a reassuring hand Evangelina swatted it away.

“You said no apologies and no lies. Fool that I was, I actually believed you.”

The Queen protested weakly. “Not him, my love. Anyone but him. You don’t unders—“

“I do not wish to understand! Not any more. If you do not wish to share me as your equal, then you will not share me at all.”

As she spoke, Evangelina grasped the white gold serpent that encircled her other arm and wrenched it free. Flinging it onto the dirty flagstones of the tenement, she stomped on the soft metal with the same heel that she had lodged in another man’s throat. Before she turned and left, she fixed Cariebasa with a deadly gaze, as if it were she and not the Gorgon who could turn someone into stone with her eyes alone.

“You were supposed to be different.”

The Queen said nothing, for there was nothing left to say. Perhaps she should have confided in the girl, but it was not in Cariebasa’s nature to do so, no more than it was Evangelina’s to stay in any one place long enough to trust anyone. The Gorgon Queen knew that when she first met her, backstage at an opera house in Egrezi Ra several years ago, that theirs would be a liaison that would burn like fire but end poorly. So why did she proceed nonetheless, despite centuries of bitter experience to warn her away from such heartbreak?

Because some things were worth the risk.

The Queen had not seen Esanga coming. He was a spoiler to her plans as much as he was a rival for Evangelina’s affections, and yet she had not been able to divine either disruption until it was too late, a fact which only confirmed her suspicions about the Oguntak boy. His sudden appearance was no accident, of this she was almost certain, but rather than sit back and let the mystery unfold Cariebasa had acted foolishly, allowing her feelings for the girl cloud her better judgment. Now Evangelina was gone, and there was only one thing left to do.

Cariebasa picked up the crumpled white gold bangle after the girl had left, and whispered to the metal likeness of the serpent in a language that was older than words themselves. Impossibly, the ornament responded to her susurrations, its mangled coils repairing themselves as it wrapped itself around the medusa’s hand and circled up her arm in a slow spiral. With each successive rotation of the serpent the Queen’s appearance changed-- her body became younger, her skin soft and white, her eyes as dark as her hair, which now spilled down her shoulders in black curls. Even her dress had transformed from her regal wrapping of fine linens to a scant white chiton that barely covered her lithe form.

Cariebasa removed her veil and regarded herself in one of Evangelina’s mirrors. In her natural form this would be an act of suicide, but thus transformed the Queen saw only the face and body of her beloved. As she adjusted her dress, she did her best to smile, although all she could muster at that moment was a grimace that was as forced as it was resigned.

---

“I did not expect to see you so early this evening,” Esanga said with a pleasantly surprised tone to his voice. The Oguntak boy had just settled into his customary haunt on the balcony of Jasper’s for the evening, from where he would conduct his business. Gone were the long nights of hauling garbage through the back alleys of the Three Parishes, labor that was as backbreaking as it was thankless. Shit-farming, the Shan-li called it, which almost made it seem like respectable work; and truth be told, had fate not intervened Esanga would still be a shit farmer.

But didn’t fate always intervene for him? For good or for ill, Esanga’s life was a never-ending series of unexpected turns and reversals. While other men might rail against such a destiny, the tribesman had learned to embrace it, such that to him and perhaps only to him did it make sense that his life had taken him from war orphan to Crusader squire to garbageman to drug kingpin before Esanga had so much as reached twenty years of age.

“You’re glowing ” Esanga couldn’t quite place it, but she had come to the dance hall with a radiance this evening that he hadn’t seen before. It was almost as if--

“Shall we dance?” No sooner had Evangelina phrased the question than the two were moving towards the floor and surrendering to the pulsating of the drums. Esanga delighted in her touch, but didn’t her skin seem cool despite the heat of the club? Nevertheless the girl writhed against him with such abandon that he wasn’t thinking so much as he was reacting, such that when she whispered into his ear that she wanted to be alone with him Esanga did not pause to reflect how much her voice had sounded like the hissing of snakes…

---

She waited three days for him. Three days Evangelina- the real Evangelina- came to Jasper’s shortly before sundown and stayed well until past dawn in the vain hope that she’d see him again. But for three days she held her vigil in vain, sitting morosely at the table from which he had held court. No one dared bother her as she sat and drank his palm wine and waited for him to appear when with each passing hour of his absence she knew exactly what had befallen her Oguntak lover. At the end of the third day she left the dance hall, never to return.

It was a cold morning in the City, and Evangelina shivered in her white cotton chiton as she guided the ’21 Magliozzi along waters that were still black and reflected the grey skies like an obsidian mirror. Where the girl and her gondola were going was anyone’s guess, but as they left the dead parish and its still-beating drums the pair moved like neither had any choice in the matter.

Chapter Six: Profit

2010-04-18T17:45:00.000-07:00

When in doubt, remember the Rules: 1. Numbers don’t lie, people do. 2. There is always more data. 3. The simplest explanation is the best. No matter how far Nolio got along in his life, he found himself inevitably returning to these three simple dicta that he learned on the first day of his education as a mathemagician. But whereas on most occasions they served as a comfort, as Nolio stared at the sea of numbers on his lectern the Rules seemed to openly mock him.

“The numbers do not lie.” As if it were yesterday he remembered sitting at the feet of none other than the venerable Tivoli Graal as he explained the Economic Cabal’s fundamental axioms, each of which had been painted in stark black glyphs on banners that hung behind Egrezi Ra’s keenest mind. Professor Graal had made this pronouncement in a rich baritone that resonated through the amphitheatre which served as the Academy’s main lecture hall and caused the several scores of initiates within to rivet their attention on the dark-skinned man who was built more like a Three Man player than an economist. For many here, this was the first time they had heard Tivoli Graal speak in person, although there wasn’t a soul in the room who wasn’t already intimately familiar with the man’s public treatises. This, however, would be no mere rehash of what the would-be economists already knew.

“And yet there is no number that I would trust with my life. You have all come to us steadfast in your faith in the Cabal, but I have come here today to demonstrate that this faith is unfounded at best, and dangerous at worst.”

Nolio could still savor the ripple of nervous excitement that had passed through his cohort when the Professor had said these things and turned their world upside-down. Like so many of the others in that lecture hall, Nolio had taken refuge in the world of numbers ever since he'd learned to count. As a child prodigy he balanced the books of his father’s saltmaking operation until word of his mathematical prowess had trickled out of the marshes he called home and Nolio was whisked away to Varo by men in black velvet robes and colored octagonal spectacles.

While Nolio’s family received a generous stipend, the boy was apprenticed to one of the Great Houses, where he spent his every waking moment performing calculations in the catacombs. At first he was entrusted merely to add columns of figures, but as he demonstrated an almost unlimited capacity for compiling sums without error young Nolio was soon moved on to ever-more complicated functions.

The counting houses of the catacombs were like great hives of numbers, with rows and rows of pasty-faced savants whispering totals back and forth and sideways along the array of lecterns. Nolio found himself seated at one of the interchanges in this great human adding machine, from whence he could perform myriad operations on the raw data all about him. The boy exulted in this ubiquity of numbers like a pig in his own filth. Here he found a world that implicitly made sense, an endless vista of cubed roots and differential equations whose rules Nolio understood.

The world of his childhood was one of confusion and frustration, an all-too-human realm where his mathematical gifts were only grudgingly appreciated by a father more interested in an heir to his saltworks than a free accountant – even a genius one – and even feared by the rest of the villagers, who saw Nolio’s wizardry with numbers to be the hallmark of something sinister and unnatural. If the boy divined a pattern at work, he couldn’t help but begin to assess the fields of probability and map the web of contingencies in his head, with the result that the more superstitious folk in his village regarded him as a child prophet with the ability to foretell the future. He was too young to explain the truth in layman’s terms, but even the best explanation probably wouldn’t have assuaged the lingering fears that trailed him like late autumn fog on the Bay of Alandi.

No, the sooner Nolio had left that world behind the better, which made it all the more overwhelming when Tivoli Graal told him that the pure abstract realm of numbers he had escaped to was not the haven of truth that he had made it out to be. For although the numbers themselves could not lie, they could in fact be the vehicles for transmitting falsehoods. That Nolio had not even entertained this as a possibility was less a function of his own personal naïveté than the complete and utter faith that Varonians had placed in the holy discipline of mathematics.

The self-professed bibliomaniacs of Iskandalon, the City’s chief rival, observed that Varo had forsaken literature for ledger books and exiled her gods to the counting houses. Here was the true faith of every Canalsider: that the Cabal was a manifestation of the divine order of things, and that the mathemagicians were its infallible servants. The Cabal, which had allowed Varo to outwit her rivals by allowing the Great Houses to predict future outcomes and act accordingly, was a complete mystery to all but a few, but Nolio had always thought he had been privy to its mysteries until that first day in the amphitheatre.

“Behind every number there is a man, and our tribe lies most effectively when it earnestly believes it is telling the truth. Where better, then, to conceal the greatest of prevarications than in the bowels of the counting houses?”

Nolio had spent the entire night feeding numbers to the savants, and every time he was confounded by the final results that were delivered back to him in half-whispered tones. It’s not that the young man couldn’t have performed the raw calculations in his head and transformed the results by himself-- in fact, he had already done as much several dozen times, only to end up with the same figures that the counting house kept repeating to him. The same figures that Nolio knew couldn’t possibly be correct. With a sigh of disgust he left the numerical intonations of the counting house and returned to his lectern, where a middle-aged bespectacled man in purple velvet robes was waiting for him. His name was Don Gabriel Terrazini and he was the lead economist for House Selloni.

“Anything?”

“Niunte,” the young savant scowled. “I ran your data in every possible combination and I still can’t pin down the anomaly.”

Don Gabriel cursed quietly under his breath and balled his fists atop the surface of the lectern. “But it’s there, isn’t it?”

“Oh, it’s there.” Nolio looked at the older mathemagician with a mixture of sympathy and pity. After all, he was just a hired troubleshooter whose reputation and livelihood never hung on any one case, whereas the poor Don could very well find himself tossed out Canalside by the House patriarchs if he couldn’t figure out what was going on.

Gabriel Terrazini was at wit’s end by the time he had contacted Dandolo. House Selloni was a medium-sized but reputable dealer in labor bonds whose books regularly met with the approving scrutiny of the SPQVs, which is why when a small hiccup appeared in the ledgers the matter was immediately and discreetly brought to the old Don’s attention. Sure enough, there was a kink in the numbers, but no sooner had Gabriel begun a formal audit of the House’s finances than the error had righted itself. That’s when things started to get strange.

Convinced that someone had fixed the data on the sly, the Don began a second review of the numbers independent of the announced audit, only to find the same anomaly had manifested itself elsewhere in the books. So again he changed the focus of his investigation, and again the odd numbers disappeared and reappeared somewhere else in the counting house’s array. The initial data was sound – not only had the veteran House economist pulled up an archived set of the numbers from their data mines on the Iskandalonian frontier, but Don Gabriel had even taken the extreme step of replacing the entire counting house to ensure against some kind of hitherto undetectable collusion among the number-wranglers. And yet the anomaly persisted, always appearing in the long view only to vanish upon closer scrutiny.

Nolio could hardly believe the old Don’s story when his employers related it to him, and then even less so when he heard it again in person. But the numbers did not lie, and after an afternoon in Selloni’s counting house the House Dandolo troubleshooter was also seeing this ghost in the array and shaking his head in disbelief. As a mathemagician in the employ of Varo’s most prestigious information brokerage, Nolio had seen many things in the course of his troubleshooting efforts, but never had a problem actually run away from him in the data. As Terrazini clenched and unclenched his fists nervously, the young turk ran through the obvious questions.

“So you pulled the backups?”

“Yes, primary and secondary. Same anomaly.”

“This only proves that the data may have been corrupt upon archival accession.”

“Of course,” the old Don sniffed. “I certainly hope that this isn’t the best analysis that Dandolo can offer.”

Now it was time for Nolio to be short. “You’d be surprised at how many times our House’s efforts are hired out because someone neglected to carry a one somewhere in their balance sheets. I can assure you that we are thorough because our time is just as valuable as it is to you.”

Terrazini relented at this, clearly too worried to bicker. “So what happens next?”

“What’s next is that I run your data in my own counting houses and see if I can reproduce the anomaly there.”

“What!” the veteran economist practically fell over the lectern. “There’s no way House Selloni will let me give you those numbers, even they did know what was going on.” The Great Houses of Varo guarded their data more jealously than their denars and minars, and with good reason, for without information any wealth would be ephemeral at best.

Nolio smiled and tapped his forehead. “Relax, I have everything I need right here.”

The old Don snorted. “You’re joking.” But the sneer on his face melted as the troubleshooter began to recite the initial data set with perfect recollection.

Terrazini cut him off after the twentieth number in the sequence, his eyes regarding Nolio with the same kind of fearful expression that the young mathemagician recalled from his home village. It was one thing to be good with numbers, but what Nolio could do with them bordered on the supernatural, even to the other members of his tribe. But this is why House Dandolo had snapped him up, and this is why he was paid by the hour what other Canalsiders were lucky to make in their entire miserable lifetimes.

“Don’t worry, Signeur. I will keep your data in the strictest confidence.”

“V-very well,” Terrazini sputtered.

“Now if you’ll excuse me,” Nolio said. “I am, after all, on the clock.”

The old Don winced at this reminder of how much money he was spending-- but better that than face the wrath of his House patriarchs, or worse yet, the SPQVs! “But of course. Grazie, Signeur. Please let me know what you discover.”

Nolio nodded and left the Selloni economist to his worries. It was long after sunset, and the troubleshooter stepped out of the counting house into the evening revelries that were already underway in this corner of the City. House Selloni made its home on the hill of Stabientia, a respectable location for a camera of this order, nestled amid the ancient fortunes of Varo’s previous administrative center.

The Hill (as it is frequently called) was all-too-easily dismissed these days by Canalsiders as a backwater, but those who were privy to the data could see that almost every House’s finances moved through Stabientia at some point, such was the concentration of its wealth. Even if the “Old” Quarter had become Varo’s head, Stabientia was and would forever be her heart, silently pumping the lifesblood of capital throughout the City and far beyond. While the Senators convened in the Old Quarter, the Cittadini assembled on the Hill, just as they had done when there were no Senators and Varo was just a collection of fishermen and refugees who had taken shelter from the tides of war. And although the Cittadini no longer had the power that they did in those days, the everyday administration of the City’s myriad parishes still fell on their shoulders.

The residents of Stabientia didn’t need to see a balance sheet to know that this was true – they felt it in their bones, and lived accordingly as if they were still the center of the world, a quality that other Canalsider found endearing or irritating. Nolio counted himself among the former group, and as such he relished any opportunity to visit the Three Parishes neighborhood. As he walked along a series of terraces that had been carved into the hillside many centuries ago, the economist found himself drifting in and out of several throngs of young partygoers. It was a good night for carousing, and the Hill’s resident merrymakers were taking advantage of the weather, making the rounds from villa to villa with a good stop here and there to breath in the evening air and do foolish things under the cover of darkness.

Every now and then a cluster of revelers hailed Nolio and asked him to join them, but he would smile pleasantly and decline. Long ago he had learned that it was better for him to enjoy such pleasures vicariously, as it was difficult for the mathemagician to silence the analytical parts of his brain. Every conversation would become so many columns of signifiers, every look and touch an array of probabilities, every social situation an assessment of risk and reward. Nolio could attempt to silence this internal counting house with drink, but this would only make matters worse. His tongue loosened, he would start thinking out loud-- first to his comrades’ amusement and delight, but inevitably to their annoyance.

Better to remain where he was, always on the periphery, where he could watch and weigh the variables of life without becoming too entangled in them himself. This is why Nolio preferred the night, as it reduced the chaos of a million souls into a smaller subset of variables.

A mob of blue-shirted youth was bearing down on him suddenly. Stabientia had won again on the hockey rink, extending their victory streak to eleven games in a row, and the team’s dedicated fanatics were celebrating by coopting every group of revelers they came across during their own impromptu victory march. “The Blues! All hail the Blues!”

Nolio looked for an easy way to escape the crush of humanity, but the terrace was narrow and afforded no stairs up and down at this particular stretch of walkway. The next thing the mathemagician knew, he had been swept into the midst of the roving party. Nolio was buffeted to and fro among the larger and more inebriated fanatics until he found a sliver of open space into which he was able to squeeze himself and catch his breath.

A girl standing next to him smiled and offered a sip of wine from the goblet in her hand. She was raven-haired and elegantly dressed, and as she raised the cup to his lips Nolio noticed a curious bracelet on her arm—serpents of white gold were intertwined in a double helix, the proportions of which were strangely mesmerizing.

“You okay?” the girl asked, her dark eyes twinkling with drunken mirth.

Nolio nodded and drank. The mulled wine was welcomingly warm, and he beamed back at his new friend. “Thank you.”

“I’m Evangelina,” she answered, almost shouting over the ever more rowdy crowd around them.

“Nolio.” A ripple went through the throng as they hit another bend in the terrace and the two found themselves pressed close to one another. Nolio, unaccustomed to such proximity with a girl as comely as Evangelina, thrilled as he felt her softness against him and smelled her perfume over the boozy atmosphere of the mob. She blushed and excused herself while Nolio changed the topic.

“Did you see the game?”

Evangelina shook her head. “You?”

“Me, neither!”

They both laughed at this as they continued to be swept along. From the size and composition of the crowd, not to mention the concentration of wine being passed from fan to fan, Nolio calculated a ninety-six percent chance of running afoul of the Greenheads by the time they made it down to the bottom of the Hill. Although the police force of the Three Parishes was notoriously corrupt, it took a dim view of any kind of civil disturbance, and the fact that the Blues’ last home game had degenerated into a riot meant that there would be little tolerance for mayhem tonight. Sure enough, no sooner had the wave of revelers reached the final bend in the terrace than they encountered a wall of olive-clad patrolmen armed with truncheons.

“Damn,” Nolio said, but his voice was swallowed up by the roar of several hundred fanatics with as little respect for the Greenheads as the latter afforded them. As the crowd began to rear back from the police line, he and Evangelina were jostled again, only this time a little more roughly. “We have to get out of here!” Nolio shouted in her ear.

“I dropped my cup,” the girl mumbled, seemingly oblivious. Nolio tried to tug her by the arm but she wriggled free of his grasp in order to continue her search. The troubleshooter sighed and surveyed the crowd, his mind suddenly aflame with calculation. Just as one of the hooligans in the front finally goaded the Greenheads into launching their assault Nolio saw a potential solution and moved, this time grabbing Evangelina as tightly as he could.

“Hey!”

As the scrum between fans and police grew violent, two things happened: the perimeter of the crowd grew more concentrated, creating sudden ribbons of vacuum in the throng’s center. Nolio dragged the girl into one of these seams just as it opened and followed its wake as it rippled through the chaos. The mathemagician squared his shoulders and pushed through the narrow opening, forcing it to stay open so that he and Evangelina could escape the ball of humanity before it was too late.

They were shunted off into a tiny garden that served as a shrine to one of Varo’s myriad patron saints, those curious semidivine creatures who supposedly served as intercessors on behalf of the One True God. Sandwiched between a tiny burbling fountain and a statue of Saint Agatha, Nolio and the girl laughed at each other as the maelstrom passed them by.

“Nice moves,” Evangelina said approvingly, her lips just inches from Nolio’s. “I was sure we’d get beaten to a pulp.”

Nolio laughed. “I’m good with crowds. It’s just a big cloud of numbers.”

“Aha, so you’re an economist!” She ran her hands down along his velvet robes. “That explains the drag. What House do you work for?”

The mathemagician bit his lip. “Dandolo.”

“Dandolo,” Evangelina repeated in an uncertain tone, “What do they sell?”

“Information.”

The girl chortled. “Now I’ve heard everything! So what’s the street value of information these days?”

“Well,” Nolio explained. “It depends on who’s asking what, but House Dandolo doesn’t post its rates. If you have to ask, you probably can’t afford us.”

Evangelina nodded at this. Nolio couldn’t help but notice that her eyes were fixated on his lips, which he now licked nervously.

“How about you?”

“Me?” the girl said dreamily. “I’m an entertainer.”

“Is that so!” Nolio tried to tease her. He may have been good with predicting the behavior of crowds, but individuals were much trickier propositions. “What’s the going rate for entertainment?”

Evangelina smiled. “If you have to ask…”

The din outside had subsided, which meant that the hooligans had either been routed or had changed the venue for their confrontation with the Greenheads. Suddenly it was very silent, save for the tinkling of water in the fountain. Evangelina took a half-step back from Nolio. “I should be going,” she said abruptly.

Nolio opened his mouth to protest, but couldn’t find the words that would keep her by his side.

“Thanks again for saving my neck,” she said.

“Niunte,” he managed to croak before she slipped back out of the garden shrine and into the darkness. Flushed and thoroughly confused, Nolio sat with Saint Agatha for several minutes in contemplation. Agatha was the patron saint of chance, the mathemagician remembered with an ironic smile. He’d always wondered why a woman had been given this divine charge, but suddenly it made perfect sense to him.

---

It didn’t surprise Nolio in the slightest that the data he’d brought back from House Selloni manifested the same anomaly. After all, the numbers did not lie. Next to the SPQVs and the Doge himself Dandolo enjoyed some of the finest real estate in all of the City, occupying an entire piazza in the Old Quarter, which the locals called with mock affection the Piazza of the Brains. Here in a City that changed its outward appearance as often as an opera singer from Egrezi-Ra was several centuries of lost Varonian architecture on display, ringing a cobblestoned pavilion dominated by a trio of fountains and a raised platform.

Every spring House Dandolo would march through the streets of this self-contained neighborhood in a curious ritual – as the information brokerage prided itself on the accuracy of its information, it publicly derided and ridiculed those troubleshooters who had made a miscalculation by parading them around the piazza and burning them in effigy. Although Dandolo was over a thousand years old, the list of those wrongdoers was surprisingly short, as no one in the House wished to have his name immortalized in such an ignominious fashion. Nolio usually didn’t worry about joining the ranks of the so-called Errati, but as this investigation proceeded he wondered if he wasn’t missing something simple, some elementary mistake that his superiors would immediately discover upon reviewing his case file.

Any sense of doubt that the mathemagician had, however, quickly gave way to his own sense of pride. Remember the Rules, Nolio thought to himself. The numbers did not lie, this was true enough, but there was always more data. House Selloni’s ledgers only represented a fraction of the Varonian bond market, and as the young troubleshooter suspected that he could gain a better perspective on the anomaly he was chasing if he could observe it in a larger context.

After running Selloni’s numbers enough times to convince himself that he hadn’t committed any basic errors Nolio asked the archivist in the counting house to bring up Dandolo’s aggregated bond numbers for the year to date so that he could feed them to the array and derive his own set of figures for House Selloni’s performance absent whatever corruption had seeped into its record-keeping. In comparing the two, his reasoning went, he’d be able to diagnose the problem and set the Don’s mind to ease.

As a small army of pages trickled down into Dandolo’s basement levels to pull the relevant papyrus scrolls, Nolio allowed his thoughts to drift back to the girl in Stabientia. Evangelina. Against his better judgment he replayed their moment in the garden over and over in his head, attempting to troubleshoot the interaction. What if he’d laughed a little more, drawn her a little closer? There were a million little things he could second-guess if he wanted to, a million missed opportunities in the space of a heartbeat. He could have obsessed like this for hours, if not longer, if the foreman of the counting house had not interrupted his reverie to report that they were ready for him.

No sooner had the Archivist queued up the aggregate figures from Dandolo’s records, howver, than Nolio realized that something was terribly, terribly wrong. For not only did the counting house array end up deriving the same set of numbers that he had taken back from House Selloni, but with each iteration of rendering these statistics the anomaly appeared not just in the derived data but elsewhere throughout the array.

“Impossible,” the young troubleshooter whispered. “I don’t believe it!”

“Signeur?”

Nolio looked at the Dandolo record-master queerly. “When were these numbers last accessed?”

“Hrmm,” the old man riffled through a small square book that he kept chained to his belt. “Six weeks ago.”

“And who pulled them up?”

The Archivist suddenly looked flustered. “Ah, well. I don’t seem to have that information on hand.”

“What? Surely you would have recorded a name!”

“Yes, yes,” the old man nodded, as if to reassure himself as much as Nolio. “But I’m afraid that in this case, there is none.” The Archivist offered up the fat little book to the mathemagician as proof, and sure enough the retrieval records for the exact same data set – down to the last folder – had been pulled, with no authorizing party listed.

It was highly unlikely that one of Nolio’s fellow troubleshooters would have been responsible for such an oversight. First of all, the archivist would never have permitted a retrieval to occur without the proper documentation; second, and perhaps more importantly, a troubleshooter never did anything anonymously. Not only were Nolio’s efforts meticulously scrutinized by his superiors, but economists themselves needed to be able to retrace their steps as they worked—a virtual impossibility if one’s work was not somehow marked in the data. Finally, there was the issue of pride. Mathemagicians were an arrogant and highly competitive lot, and passing up an opportunity to display one’s obvious brilliance by toiling without credit was all but unheard of.

No, if the data had been called up anonymously it couldn’t have been a troubleshooter who was responsible, but someone in the higher echelons of House Dandolo’s leadership. Nolio ground his teeth as he contemplated asking the Archivist the obvious follow-up question, but he didn’t see the point. Either the old man honestly did not remember who had retrieved the figures or he did recall and was unwilling to share, which meant that in either scenario he would not get the answer he was looking for.

Nolio admired the Archivist and did not wish to endanger his vocation by forcing him into an uncomfortable position on his behalf (and on this point the young turk was probably flattering himself that the old man would even consider sharing any such privileged information with him). Besides, as Tivoli Graal had taught him: There is always more data.

---

On a good day it took a few hours to make the five-mile trip down the Grand Canal from the Old Quarter to the docks and warehouses of Terminalia. On a bad day even the massive ox-driven paddlewheel ferries could not break through the logjam of watercraft that choked the City’s main thoroughfare day and night.

Nolio had an intimate understanding of the ebb and flow of Varo’s traffic, as sure as a mariner understood the erratic tides, and as a result he was able to make the passage within the hour by a curious combination of locomotion. Here he started on a ferry-boat, only to leap off at a seldom used exchange where he traded up for a local carrier who plied a route that paralleled the main route through unblocked canals. When the smaller craft forked in the wrong direction Nolio disembarked at the foot of the Hill and crossed from Stabientia to Marilia by the Bridge of the Eleven Pillars, the last such crossing of the Grand Canal downstream.

Beyond this point the waterway would widen so as to embrace the sea and its mercantile bounty, culminating in a vast shoreline of quays and storage houses. With precious few exceptions, those goods destined to appear in any of the City’s myriad markets would be off-loaded here first, where the SPQVs could weigh, measure, and stamp everything with its official chop—a red wax seal bearing the four letters known throughout the Three Continents, the telltale mark of legal commerce.

Of course, for every trade item that ended up in Varo legally there were several that entered the City through less than legitimate channels. What these black market wares lacked in confidence they made up for in affordability, and rare was the Canalsider who could afford the SPQV seal for all of his shopping. Due to the illegal nature of this commerce, Varonian black marketeers were obliged to remain always one step ahead of the law, gathering in large impromptu bazaars far from the watchful eyes of the well-regulated fora. Terminalia’s trackless warren was the perfect venue for such illicit enterprise, and as a result on any given day you could wander from black market to black market if you knew where to look for them.

Nolio knew these markets well from his childhood, as there was no better way to sell salt than under the table. Large saltworks had little choice to sell their product in bulk through heavily-taxed legitimate channels or the relatively low paying bulk concessions offered by the Doge to keep the fleet well-stocked with salted fish and beef, but smaller operations could hazard the black market and turn a handsome profit.

Every month young Nolio accompanied his father on the trip to the City, slipping across the Bay of Skulls under the darkness of Diala’s new moon on a flat-bottomed boat designed to skulk along Varo’s westward tidal flats that was loaded with fleur del sel from the family’s saltworks. Father and son would always enjoy an early morning breakfast in the West End with the fishermen before making their way to the Terminalia— it was one of Nolio’s favorite memories, sitting down to a giant steaming mug of Salumar coffee and a towering stack of griddle cakes with the draggers and oystermen, listening to his father laugh and make small talk with the waitstaff and the old salts.

After filling their stomachs to the point of bursting in a foolish attempt to match the legendary West End appetite the two would carry their unlicensed wares across town in a cousin’s gondola. While many a visitor to the City is struck with the romantic profile cut by myriad gondoliers plying the canals, few realize that the gondola is a workhorse in the vast smuggling industry. Nolio’s Canalsider relative made just as much money carrying contraband than he did ferrying passengers, with a custom-built boat that carried the additional illegal bulk as inconspicuously as possible.

They would always transit the Grand Canal just before dawn, the water and sky mirroring each other perfectly at this liminal hour—sometimes splashes of pastel colors as the not-yet-risen sun struggled to find a foothold for the morning, but most of time grey atop grey, twin expanses of colorless void above and below.
As luck would have it, it was another grey day in Varo, as Nolio neared the City’s outermost parish he felt the seemingly ever-present mists turn to a light rain. He cursed and flipped up the hood on his velvet mathemagician’s robe, too distracted by the problem at hand to pay close enough attention to the weather.

On the mainland he had had a better sense of such things, following his father’s lead to identify the sort of clouds that would pass overhead without molesting the saltwork’s evaporation pans and those thunderheads that presaged rain. If it were the latter, Nolio had the privilege of ringing the alarm bell, which would bring family and friends scurrying from their business elsewhere in the village to help roll out the movable sheds and protect the harvest. Between the genuine knowledge of his father and his own inborn wisdom concerning complexity Nolio became such a good reader of the weather that it lead to inevitable accusations that he was somehow controlling it.

This was a common theme among those ignorant of the principles of hypermathematics, the reversal of causality that recast its practitioners as members of some shadowy conspiracy. To some extent the mathemagicians fostered this misconception, referring to their practice as the Economic Cabal and cultivating an air of inevitability to their divinations when in fact the laws of probability were still fully in force. The key, as always, was better data.

Every city has its black markets, but only Varo had one dedicated to information itself. Il Foro del Numeri Perdidi— the Forum of Lost Numbers. Here a mathemagician could find copies of almost every Great House’s data, no matter how supposedly well-guarded such figures were, second or third-hand reproductions made by disgruntled or enterprising scribes looking to make a couple of denars for their perfidy.

Some of the bootleg copies were wildly inaccurate, with columns of figures having been reproduced from faulty memories or recopied by illiterates, but many were surprisingly true to their sources. Others were actual original volumes that had been acquired through any of myriad illegal methods, from breaking into the subterranean vaults carved into the rock of Hightown which housed countless reams of House records to waylaying the archival caravans which sent precious backup copies to the salt mines along the Iskandalonian frontier or the lonely windswept cliffs of Ryzien, that ill-fated island now populated only by ghosts and papyrus scrolls. One also had to be especially on guard for what mathemagicians called “poisoned numbers”, fake bootleg copies promulgated by some Houses that were accurate in all but a few critical respects. Ingesting a set of data like this into one’s array could spell disaster for any attempt at divining the future.

The Forum of Lost Numbers hummed with the predictable energy of illicit commerce mingled with the kind of mania inspired by the peculiar nature of the product being bought and sold. Today the foro had secured a large empty warehouse that reeked of offal, but even the sharp smell of the presumably equally illegal butchery did not deter those who dealt in numbers from coming to ply their trade. Large Salumar carpets were spread out on the vast floor, each finely embroidered rectangle piled so high and thick with books, scrolls, and sheafs that it was almost impossible to see the rugs themselves. These islands of bootleg delights stretched for as far as the eye could see in every direction, like the produce stands of the Foro Magno, only a veritable feast for the mind instead of the body.

Nolio strode through the outer perimeter of these carpets, barely suppressing a laugh at the discounted tide charts being hawked by a shifty-looking Varonian that were so inaccurate that the mathemagician could tell just from a glance. A sailor who put his trust into such cheaply-obtained data would surely wreck his craft when the Eieronian tides carried him contrary to his calculations. Some numbers were worth paying the asking price, Nolio thought to himself as he moved deeper into the makeshift market.

The young mathemagician had learned that the more valuable the data for sale, the more intimidating the sellers, and sure enough as Nolio reached the towering piles of other Houses’ bond ledgers he found himself in the company of genuine criminals, not the flimflam market pickpockets who preyed upon the naifs at the market’s entrance. Although the Shan-li tended to dominate this dark inner core of the foro, everyone knew that the man who truly ruled the market was a man only known as the Iskandalonian.

Rumor had it that he had once been a high-ranking priest at the Great Library before leaving the City of Letters for the City of Numbers, although to be honest he looked more like an old soldier than a veteran librarian. The Iskandalonian had made his fortune off his intimate knowledge of the badlands that separated his native land from the Varony, an arid region best known for its preservative qualities with regard to the written word. Ill-armed archival caravans could routinely disappear on this lawless frontier, their precious cargos falling into the Iskandalonian’s greedy hands. Even those deliveries which reached their intended destinations were no less vulnerable to the old Librarian’s predations, as he commanded a small army of sappers who tunneled through the ancient Salumar salt mines to steal the numbers right out from underneath the foundations of those otherwise impregnable fortresses of data.

Nolio, the son of a saltmaker and a mathemagician, had always pondered this intimate connection between two of Varo’s most precious commodities: salt and information. The Iskandalonian presided over both trades, running salt across the border when the data was lean and vice versa. It was for this reason that Nolio even knew about the Iskandalonian in the first place, not as a purveyor of black market numbers but the kingpin of salt.

Oh, how his father would curse him when he flooded the foro with his product! Although slightly pinkish in hue and with a claylike aftertaste, this Iskandalonian salt was cheap and its appearance at the black markets often spelled doom for the small salt farmer’s profits. This time, however, Nolio was pleased to see his father’s nemesis, who regarded the young mathemagician with his one good eye warily until he recognized the waterlogged boy.

“Well, if it isn’t Dandolo’s finest come to visit. Xaire, my boy, xaire!”

Nolio nodded and smiled, and the Iskandalonian did his best to return the gesture through the gnarled landscape of wrinkles and scars that had almost fixed his face into a battle mask. Those who people who traded in rumors suggested that the old librarian’s departure from the Priesthood of On had not been voluntary, and that many of those who had been responsible for forcing him out had paid the price in blood. Still, the Iskandalonian was a reassuring sight to the mathemagician, who had grown to think of the grizzled bandit as a kind of uncle; strangely enough, the Iskadalonian seemed to return the affection, much to the perpetual astonishment of the rest of the foro, who justly regarded the man with fear.

“We haven’t seen you here in months, son.” The Iskandalonian’s one good eye twinkled with avuncular tenderness, the other eye beneath a patch of black studded leather. When asked how he lost his eye, the librarian’s never gave the same answer twice. The last time someone had asked when Nolio was in earshot, he remembered the old man warning the questioner never to court a Gorgon unless you’re willing to put both eyes out. Only the troubleshooter knew the real story, that the Iskandalonian had been born deformed and left to die in the desert by his parents. A priest had heard the wailing infant and brought him back to the Great Library, where he was raised by the monks of the Scriptorium. The boy could read before he could walk, and translated his first major work at age four. Truly, he was a gift from On himself!

“I’ve been busy.” Nolio actually sounded apologetic as he gave the Iskandalonian’s wares a cursory glance. “House Dandolo is a harsh mistress.”

The Iskandalonian chortled. “You have no idea of what busy is, boy, until you’ve seen the Scriptorium in full operation -- a thousand hands writing in unison, day and night, until the job is done. That’s how we do things in I-town.”

Nolio took the librarian’s bravado in good humor, laughing at the Iskandalonian’s use of the Varonian nickname for his own home city. Most hailing from the City of Letters took the abbreviation as a something akin to a mortal affront, but then again the Iskandalonian always seemed to have more of a sense of humor than his pedantic kinsmen. The old man took the shared laughter as a sign that he had won the day’s contest and settled down to business:

“So what’s so important to you that you’d waste Dandolo’s time coming down here to look for it?”

“Bond data,” Nolio explained. “As fresh as you’ve got.”

The Iskandalonian fingered a thick scar on his chin where his salt and pepper beard refused to grow. “What House?”

“Selloni.”

The old librarian groaned. “I was worried you’d say that. You’re not the first person to come asking for it, you know.”

“Damn it!” the young troubleshooter couldn’t help but express his frustration.

“Hang on a minute,” the Iskandalonian said. “I didn’t say that that I gave him anything.”

“No?”

“What do you take me for? I told the caller I’d check my inventory and get back to him. Meanwhile I had my boys make a quick copy of the set.”

Nolio smiled. It was a standard ploy at the Forum of Lost Numbers – when someone asked for a certain valuable data set, you stalled the buyer long enough to make another copy of the information, because chances were that someone else would be coming after those same numbers sooner rather than later. The best antidote to the magic of hypermath was a mathemagical counterspell using the identical data set, making the practice of the Economic Cabal a perpetual tug of war between rival spreadsheets.

“So you have two copies then.”

The Iskadalonian grimaced. “That’s the problem, son. I did have two copies, but someone saw fit to pluck them both out of my inventory.”

“What?”

“Sorry, my boy. I usually run a tight ship, so if I ever do figure out who was responsible for giving up the goods even the mercy of On will not preserve him. Clearly someone is a couple of steps ahead of you.”

Nolio cursed his rotten luck. So much for Saint Agatha’s blessings! Out of desperation, he asked: “So this caller. Did he have a name?”

The Iskandalonian shook his head. “You know I can’t do that, not even for you.”

The young troubleshooter nodded, chastened. The only thing that made such a black market possible was the protection of anonymity. Buyers and sellers could lie, cheat, and steal with relative impunity, but not a one dared to name a name, lest they find themselves immediately shunned by their colleagues and forever locked out of the business. “Well, will you at least keep me in mind if those numbers resurface?”

“Physika!” The old veteran nodded. “Of course.”

Nolio turned to go, but then paused. “Have you been to the salt market recently?”

“Every month.”

The young troubleshooter swallowed. “How… how is my father doing?”

The Iskandalonian smiled. “He’s fine, Nolio. You know he always asks me about you—that is, when he’s not cursing me out for flooding his market.”

Nolio laughed, as did the former librarian, who surprised the boy by catching him in a bear hug before he could take his leave.

“Take care of yourself,” the Iskandalonian said, “Katalaves?”

The young mathemagician smiled and took his leave, trying not to read too much into the worried expression chiseled into the old priest’s face.

---

Shit, Nolio thought to himself as the rain grew steadier, soaking his velvet through and matting his hair into a greasy clump on his head. Ever since he’d come to the City he’d lost his attunement with the weather. Perhaps it was the lack of a clear vista that kept him off-kilter, but every once in a while the young troubleshooter wondered if it wasn’t something more profound than that.

It wasn’t enough that his shopping trip to the Forum of Lost Numbers had come up empty-- as he stooped under an awning to wait out a particularly violent cloudburst that drove sheets of water into the canals of Terminalia with such force that they seemed to froth like Southlander chocolate, he noticed that someone had mirrored his pause from a distance. Nolio squinted at the hooded figure through the rain, but all he could tell was that it was waiting on him to make his next move. The mathemagician cursed his vision, made too soft too soon by staring too closely at the balance sheets on his lectern, and wondered what to do.

Fortunately an opportunity presented itself in the form of a large garbage scow piled high with refuse and shepherded by half a dozen Oguntak. This wasn’t one of the normal barges which plied the residential canals, but one of the larger watercraft which received the aggregate waste from those local routes, a veritable mountain of trash that perfectly eclipsed Nolio’s view of his tail – and presumably vice-versa.

The young troubleshooter did not wait for the rain to subside, but dashed off, using the mound of the transfer barge as cover for as long as was possible in hopes of eluding his pursuer. Sure enough Nolio seemed to have succeeded in that regard, such that he was genuinely surprised and more than a little annoyed when he almost ran smack into a hooded figure.

“Watch it!” a woman’s voice called out from underneath several pounds of rain gear. Was it Nolio’s imagination, or did her voice sound familiar—

“So we meet again, number jockey.”

The mathemagician stared in disbelief at Evangelina’s smirk, which was now clearly visible beneath her waterproof cowl. “You look like a drowned rat. A drowned rat in black velvet.”

Nolio tried to affect a similarly disaffected air, failing mostly to do so. This seemed only to broaden Evangelina’s smile. “I mean, you and me in a city of a million souls. What are the odds?”

The mathemagician narrowed his eyes. This was something he happened to be good at. “Well, either we’re extraordinarily fortuitous…”

“Or?” the young girl asked, her eyes sparkling.

“…or you’ve been following me for some reason.”

To her credit, Evangelina did not attempt to feign indignance, but chuckled. “Hold that thought,” she said, reaching into the folds of her Ferrari drag to produce a hand crossbow. Nolio started, but the girl’s eyes were elsewhere, fixed on something behind him.

“Duck!” Evangelina shouted; Nolio dropped to the ground just in time for the steel-tipped quarrel to whiz past his cheek and find its mark, causing an unseen figure to howl in pain.

“Stay down,” the young girl commanded the mathemagician as she strode towards her target and cranked back the crossbow to reload; Nolio ignored her and followed close behind.

Lying in a puddle of rainwater and freshly pooling blood was the hooded figure Nolio had spied from afar – a Cebalese man of indeterminate age with a crossbow bolt protruding from his windpipe. Already his eyes were glazed, the erratic movement of his body simply the final meaningless twitches of a dying man. Nolio shuddered, but Evangelina cursed.

“I didn’t mean to kill him,” she explained. “I just wanted to knock him out with a poison dart. Figures the day I hit a bullseye is the day I didn’t need it. Now we’ll never know who hired him.”

Nolio stood mute, wondering why the rest of the world had not registered the fact that a murder had just taken place. But save for an old man grilling some sickly-looking fish from the Canal over a small brazier, there was no one who had witnessed the brief altercation. The troubleshooter watched as Evangelina did a brisk but thorough search of the Cebalese man’s earthly possession, only to curse again when all she turned up was a knife.

“All right,” she said, standing up. “Time to go. Life’s cheap in Terminalia, but it ain’t free.”

“Where are we going?” Nolio resisted as Evangelina tugged his arm.

“I have a gondola waiting.”

“Of course you do.”

Evangelina looked up and down the canal skittishly. “There’s no time. Whether you trust me or not, I just saved your life. Want to double down on the possibility that he was the only one hired to kill you?”

Nolio considered this. “I’ll come with you, on the condition that you tell me who you’re working for. Deal?”

The girl smiled. “Let’s go, then.”

Evangelina did indeed have a gondola waiting – not any gondola, but a ’21 Magliozzi, an achingly classy bit of black lacquer with rich purple upholstery. Nolio craned his neck around as they approached the boat. “Where’s your gondolier?”

The girl paused for a beat. “Don’t have one. She practically handles herself anyway. Get in.”

Nolio clambered into the passenger seat as Evangelina took up the punter’s position on the stern and pushed off from the quay. The indeterminate rainy gray of the afternoon was giving way to an ever-darkening gloom, although the rain was finally beginning to abate. The young troubleshooter absently fingered the lacquer until his fingers alit upon a splintered hole a few inches above the waterline. Before he could say anything, however, Evangelina explained:

“The previous owner was something of a smuggler.”

Nolio laughed. “Aren’t we all?”

Evangelina smiled at this, then paddled the gondola in silence as darkness enveloped the City. Even in a more thickly-inhabited parish such a heavy evening fog would have swallowed all but the most powerful of lights -- here on the edge of Terminalia the blackness was deeper than the mere absence of illumination, but something that actively sought out the light and devoured it. Nolio’s gondolier proceeded very slowly through this yawning inky void, her short strokes and the gentle lapping of unseen waves against the boat’s hull creating a mesmerizing rhythm that the young troubleshooter was almost loath to disturb. Almost.

“So why were you following me?”

Evangelina sighed. “A promise is a promise. My boss is Francesco Sabatini. You may have heard of him.”

Nolio gulped. He spent enough time in Stabientia to know that Sabatini was one of its up and coming criminal elements. Evangelina took Nolio’s startled silence as an affirmative answer and continued:

“Signeur Sabatini is a man with many business interests. House Selloni helps facilitate these interests, capisce? So when it came to his attention that Selloni had hired an auditor from Dandolo, naturally my employer wanted to learn as much about you as possible.”

“So that night on the terrace was a set-up?” Nolio had begun to suspect as much, but he tried to feign naivete for the benefit of his gondolier, trying to suppress a chuckle as he did so.

“Sorry,” Evangelina said. “A hockey riot isn’t hard to start, especially in these parts. I just needed to be in the right place at the right time.”

“Brava,” the young troubleshooter. “But if Mister Sabatini thinks someone’s after his business, I’m afraid he’s going to be somewhat disappointed.”

“I know,” Evangelina said, a wicked gleam in her eye. “But my other employer will be rather pleased, I should think.”

Nolio bolted upright in his seat. “What?” Suddenly he was all too aware of the all-embracing darkness that surrounded them. It was not merely unusual-- there was something unnatural about it, something tangible and even physical, as if the gondola were passing through a heavy black curtain of spiderwebs. The mathemagician felt a chill run down his spine; if his hair were still not soaking wet, Nolio was certain that at that moment it would be standing on end.

“Where are you taking us!”

“Relax,” Evangelina tried to reassure him, even as the gloom threatened to suffocate them both. “She only wishes to meet you.”

“She?” Nolio demanded as much as his captor as the darkness itself. “She who?”

“She who, indeed!” A voice, that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once. A woman’s voice, or at least the voice of someone who wished to sound like a woman. Or something. Nolio felt his entire body become numb when he heard her voice – its voice—and the gently hissing laughter which followed. Primordial fear seized the young troubleshooter, for although he had never met such a creature in his all too brief lifetime an eternity of instinct welled up from deep within his blood to infuse his soul with knowledge and terror.

“Gorgon,” Nolio whispered, his voice so tiny that surely the darkness should have swallowed it whole, but instead it sounded to ears as if it were a shout.

“Yes, child.” Now that it had a name, its voice-- her voice-- was unmistakably reptilian, no matter how feminine. Nolio felt the rise and fall of nations in between the beats of his heart, aeons seeming to transpire between the rising and falling of his own chest. “I am Queen Cariebasa, first among Gorgons!”

Cariebasa! The mathemagician knew this name. Queen Cariebasa, proudest and most powerful of Gorgonkind, who had ruled over the Third Continent until… Until what? Nolio tried to remember, his mind frenzied with fear. Something had happened – something terrible. History had at last overtaken a continent which had since the beginning of time lay in the thrall of myth, and in the titanic clash of these two forces myth at last was shattered and history inherited the ruins. Is this how he remembered it himself, Nolio thought, or is this how she was making him recall it? For the living darkness seemed to reverberate with her.

“Why am I here?”

Cariebasa laughed and the darkness convulsed. “You are here, Nolio, because you are special. Even you have no idea how special you really are. So many years spent on such trivial things. If you only understood what you were truly capable of!”

“Dandolo recognizes my worth,” Nolio said, surprising even himself with the tone of defensiveness he adopted.

“Bean counters! What do they know? You were better off on your father’s salt farm.”

“What do you know of my father?”

The Gorgon clicked her forked tongue. “Such impertinence, and in the presence of royalty! There was a time when I would have turned mortals to stone for far less. But seasons change, as do the fortunes of men and monsters.”

“Which are you, exactly?” Nolio was no longer afraid of the voice in the dark, although he respected its power. In the course of conducting business House Dandolo dealt with the entire spectrum of inhumanity, from ogre kings to ancient dragons, and now that his initial panic had subsided he fell back on his training. Remember the rules, he thought to himself.

The Queen laughed at the boy’s continued insouciance. “An excellent question! I daresay you and I could debate this issue at length, but as our time is short I’m afraid you must simply trust me. “

“Trust you!” Nolio tried not to sound horrified, but it was almost as if he had no choice save to reveal his innermost thoughts in the Gorgon’s presence. The young troubleshooter knew precious little about the dark arts, except for the fact that its practitioners were never to be trifled with, and the race of medusae were regarded as accomplished sorceresses.

“Yes, trust me.” Did Cariebasa’s voice actually sound wounded? “I have taken the liberty of procuring something important to you. I cannot make heads or tails of it, but I know you will be able to.”

The absolute darkness that Nolio and the Gorgon were hanging in suddenly yielded to a soft light emanating from the seat next to the mathemagician, where two leatherbound folios had appeared. Nolio reached out to touch the books, knowing immediately that these were the missing volumes from the Iskandalonian’s collection. “How did you know?”

“You work your divinations, child, and I work mine. Suffice it to say that I knew that these tomes could not fall into the hands of our mutual enemy.”

“Our enemy?” Nolio asked, emphasizing the first word as if to suggest that he and Cariebasa were incapable of sharing anything, even an adversary.

“I know how it works with your kind,” the Gorgon sighed. “If I told you now you wouldn’t believe me, and furthermore you’ll be less likely to accept my help at face value as a result. No, you’ll just need to figure this out on your own.”

The boy looked around, his eyes struggling to make sense of the dim shadows that surrounded him. “I don’t understand any of this.”

“I know.” As the Gorgon spoke, the boy could make out a veiled figure approaching the gondola. “This is why I can tell you these things. I dare not make sense yet, not when the enemy has the upper hand. But the tide is turning, child – can’t you feel it?”

“The tide?”

“’Remember the rules’! Isn’t that what they taught you?” The figure stood opposite him now, standing on the quay. Nolio could smell the Gorgon’s presence behind the expensive perfumes and powders, and for a moment the primal fear returned. Queen Cariebasa laughed, clearly exulting in her ability to inspire such awe.

“Remember the rules!”

No sooner had the Gorgon uttered her last syllable than Nolio and Evangelina were alone again, on an empty canal somewhere between the outskirts of Terminalia and nowhere. The mists still girded their gondola, but the darkness was beginning to give way to lights ahead of them. Someone was reveling late into the evening, and Evangelina quickened her pace at the vague tinkle of laugher and the distant thumping of drums. The girl had made little conversation until now, when she brightened at the sound of merriment.

“Care to join me in a little celebration for having cheated death once again?”

Nolio stared at the serpentine bangle of white gold that ensnared Evangelina’s left arm. “Grazie, signeura. But I have my work to attend to.”

“Suit yourself, number jockey.”

Evangelina deposited her charge at the nearest public barge junction and poled her Magliozzi towards the sounds of revelry. Nolio looked up and down the canal several times before he was convinced that he was not being followed, then cracked open the first of the two tomes while he waited for his connection. No sooner had he reached the end of the first column of figures than he laughed out loud. Flipping forward several pages he couldn’t help but laugh again, and again when he confirmed his suspicions by checking in the other book.

By the time the transit barge finally crawled into view, Nolio had both volumes stowed carefully under his arm and his mirth held firmly in check. Remember the rules, the Gorgon had said. If she hadn’t been a Gorgon, Nolio believed he could kiss her.

“Tide’s changing,” the ferryman said absently as Nolio took his place along the passenger rail.

“Of course it is,” Nolio responded to the boatman’s surprise. “Of course it is.”

---

Tivoli Graal was a creature of many habits, chief of which was waking up at an hour so early that even a fisherman would balk at rising. After taking his coffee at a Salumar bakery that had been open continuously for three centuries the venerable don would retire with a savory pastry to the vast trading floor of the Old Quarter Exchange. Although it would still be several hours before the bond and commodities markets would open, already the early traders were busy at work deciphering the bolus of information delivered overnight from overseas, from reams of indices compiled in the colonies to the latest prices culled from the myriad House light telegraphs that pulsed without end from atop the rock of Hightown. Here amid the eerily wriggling of phosphorescent light globes Professor Graal would wallow in pure information as the day struggled to be born out of the weave of numbers and human fallibility.

Idealism kills, Graal taught his students, those frighteningly astute minds destined to help maintain Varo’s stranglehold on the world for yet another generation. It’s not that the old Egrezi Ra’an mathematician was a harsh realist-- far from it, in all truth. His idealism was born of the City itself. Here amid a million souls piled upon each other was a kind of salvation that came from no font of divinity; here along Varo’s winding canals humanity was redeemed by a million hopes and dreams that bowed to no king and feted no queen. Here emperors waited in line alongside any other Canalsider for a bowl of noodles. Where else in the world was such a thing possible? If ever there were an ideal to champion, it was this oasis of light in a sea of darkness; if ever there were an idealism to kill for, it was the promise that Varo extended to the world by its very existence.

In a sense, Tivoli Graal’s story was no different than that of any other immigrant to the City. As a boy he was lured to Varo by visions of a better life than that of a monk sweeping the floors of some decrepid temple in his native E-Ra. Young Tivoli had been presented to the Order of the Null Set by his parents on his fourth birthday, as was the custom in that ancient city. The boy’s aptitude with numbers sufficiently impressed the brothers, who saw mathematics as an avenue to experiencing the divine, and after a tearful goodbye Graal became a novitiate. Many thus inducted would have counted their blessings, but it soon became evident even to the monks that Tivoli Graal was no ordinary child.

Not only was he a prodigy, but his zeal for numbers and the truth they revealed quickly exceeded the limits imposed by the faith. Even the severest of beatings could not steer the boy from the path of heresy, with the result that the brotherhood kept Tivoli as far away from the divine counting boards as they could, lest he taint them with his unorthodox calculations. Undaunted, Graal counted his own pebbles and scratched his equations in the sand, all the while dreaming of escape to that godless City which had dared profane the holy discipline of mathematics by applying it to the world at large.

Fifty years had come and gone since he made that frightful passage as a stowaway in the hold of a grain barge, drinking bilge water for sustenance and fighting off the depredations of giant rats the size of mastiffs and the sexual advances of his fellow hitchhikers. In those five decades Tivoli Graal had gone from a scared child on the quays of Terminalia to House Dandolo’s most feared mathemagician and the Economic Cabal’s finest instructor. Several generations of troubleshooters had now studied at his feet, such that Professor Graal for all intents and purposes had become the Cabal for these young turks. Never before had any one teacher enjoyed the preeminence and universal admiration than this runaway monk from E-Ra who had found his salvation here in the City of Numbers.

Nolio knew all of this, of course. He had practically worshipped Graal, which made what he was about to do a kind of blasphemy. But hadn’t he taught him the Rules in the first place? Numbers don’t lie, people do. There is always more data. The simplest explanation is the best. Had not these rules brought him exactly here at this moment, where a young student had no choice but to confront his master?
He had known exactly where to find him. How many times had Nolio joined the old man on his early morning vigil when he was still a student?

The rest of his cohort blanched at the thought of getting up hours before dawn when they’d already been up well past midnight studying for yet another grueling day of instruction, but the young saltmaker’s son knew that the world according to Tivoli Graal began here on the exchange floor. Whatever facts and figures were pounded into their heads by day, it was in this place that Nolio would find his true education. At some point the professor even started bringing two Salumar pastries with him; mentor and protégé would sit and break their fast together, washing their food down with an endless sea of numbers.

“I brought you a curry bun.”

Had Nolio expected the old don to be surprised? Now it was he who seemed off- balance all of a sudden. The boy advanced uncertainly until he could see Tivoli’s broad toothy smile in the phosphene glow of the exchange’s night lights.

“Maestro. You- you were expecting me?”

Although they supposedly worked for the same Great House, Nolio had not seen Graal face to face in years, but even in the dim lighting he could tell that his mentor had hardly changed at all since their last meeting. A large barrel of a man, Tivoli Graal was almost preternaturally strong – especially for a mathemagician, whose species tended towards the frail and pasty – built more like a pit fighter than an economist, his dark features seeming to defy the ravages of age as surely as others his age would succumb.

The maestro however found himself looking upon a greatly changed former pupil. When last he’d laid eyes upon Nolio he was still a young boy, as exuberant as he was impressionable, but here the old don could discern hard experience and the faint glimmer of wisdom. The life of a Dandolo troubleshooter may seem like an easy one to someone who judges a hard day’s work by the callouses on his hands or the lashes on the back, but Graal knew better. Three years in the service of House Dandolo might as well be thirty years chained to a galley, and only the toughest of recruits lasted much longer than Nolio already had.

“Look,” Tivoli gestured towards a panel of shifting numbers to their left. “Grain futures are about to collapse. Do you know why?”

Before he could catch himself Nolio defaulted to his best student behavior, his eyes scanning the rest of the floor for the solution to his teacher’s problem. The young troubleshooter drank the data on the exchange floor, his brain automatically sorting each figure and processing the rows of columns of numbers in search of a pattern. But he could not find one.

“Maestro?”

Tivoli looked at his former pupil with a sly twinkle in his dark eyes. Then he coughed, clearing his throat such that the sound echoed throughout the entire chamber. Nolio immediately noticed a flurry of activity in the section of the market reserved for commodities futures – even at this distance, the young troubleshooter could smell the whiff of panic among the early morning traders. Placards flew up and down in rapid succession, each embossed with a numeral and the Shan-li glyph for grain, the prices falling so quickly that the sign-holders barely had enough time to grab the next figure before it was time to swap it for something even lower.

Nolio looked at Tivoli, who chuckled. “I have a dozen grain barges from Cherindaal cruising leisurely around the Sea of Sunken Hopes this time of year. Whenever our interests require lower prices, I dump Cherin corn on the market. The simplest explanation is the best, no?”

The student gave his teacher a weak smile that fooled neither of them. “Speaking of simple explanations, maestro…”

“You are about to tell me about House Selloni, aren’t you?”

“Indeed.” Nolio chose his words with caution. “Then you know about the… anomalies in the House ledgers?”

“Yes. The matter was brought to my attention several weeks ago. I was warned that the chief economist there might try to hire his own troubleshooter. I didn’t suspect that it would be one of our own, though!”

“What?” The young mathemagician was thoroughly confused now.

“He never told you.”

“Told me wha--”

“Gabriel Terrazini was the subject of a formal inquiry by the SPQVs. They’d suspected him of manipulating the bond market and hired me to investigate.”

Nolio said nothing to this, so the aged don continued.

“I pulled up his books and sure enough, the House ledger was riddled with irregularities. Terrazini was clever, I’ll give him credit for that – he’d employed some sophisticated transformations in his books such that a novice would not be able to detect any tampering in the numbers. That’s why the SPQVs went straight to the top on this one.”

“I—I…” Nolio half-heartedly tried to interject, but Graal continued his lecture, adopting a chiding tone as he did so.

“I’ll bet Don Terrazini was as cagey as a mien san when he explained himself to you, wasn’t he? You probably asked to take a copy of his numbers back to Dandolo and he refused.”

Nolio nodded blankly.

“Well, I give him credit for choosing the best. As soon as I heard that you were on the case, I knew it was only a matter of time before you’d come find me here. Now you know. I’m sorry that you’ve wasted your efforts on this one, boy, but the House will compensate you for your labor, as I suspect Terrazini’s assets are being frozen as we speak.”

All this time Nolio had been hoping against hope that this conversation would go otherwise, but as Graal laid out his chain of incontrovertible logic the boy’s heart sank. When the don at last was finished speaking, his protégé took a deep breath and produced the two volumes that Cariebasa had given him.

Normally Tivoli Graal was a difficult man to read, but the young troubleshooter caught the involuntary expression of shock in his old master’s body language and the hint of fear in his eyes. Nolio cleared his throat just as loudly as Graal had done, causing no end of confusion among the commodities traders across the room as they attempted to interpret this unexpected second message.

“I have another theory, maestro. In the course of doing his job, Gabriel Terrazini stumbles across some irregularities in his House’s ledgers. He discreetly contacts House Dandolo to troubleshoot the anomaly, unaware of two simple but crucial facts: one, that said anomaly is part of a broader pattern of inconsistency affecting the entire bond market; and two, that House Dandolo is at the center of this pattern.

“Did you really think I was that stupid, professor, that I wouldn’t follow the Rules no matter where they lead me? The numbers didn’t lie, but the people behind them did. Did you think I wouldn’t recognize your handiwork in the transformations? Terrazini was smart enough to know that the numbers didn’t add up, but you know as well as I that he was hardly a genius, yet suddenly his ledgers were laced with hypermathematical operations worthy of a Dandolo troubleshooter himself.

“But I didn’t need to cast any aspersions on Don Terrazini’s abilities as an economist in order to prove that what I found in House Selloni’s books wasn’t his doing. I just needed more data. Funny that the last six months of bond data have become such hot commodities in the Forum of Lost Numbers, but then again someone’s been busy pulling the originals and replacing them with almost perfect copies.”

By this point Nolio had found his voice, and now it was he who was lecturing his former mentor. “How many people have the means and wherewithal to do such a thing, maestro? You yourself have slways taught us that the simplest explanation is the best, and the simplest answer has brought me here to you. Someone has been manipulating the entire bond market for months now, and someone else has been covering the first person’s tracks!”

“What makes you so certain?” Tivoli Graal tried to maintain his composure in the face of this withering analysis, but Nolio could sense the old man’s weakening resolve.

“Because you would have gotten it right the first time, maestro.”

Graal looked at his former pupil, who met his gaze with a look that was equal parts admiration and contempt. That the former was still possible caused the veteran mathemagician’s eyes to brim with tears; even when imagining the worst of his teacher, Nolio had managed to pay him the ultimate compliment. It was shame however that caused the E-Ra’an don to turn his head away. Tivoli Graal said nothing, which in turn confirmed everything.

“Why?” Nolio’s voice was small, as if he himself had not expected to be right about this. Rather, the young economist had hoped against hope that he was mistaken, that the Rules had failed him. Better the Rules than the one who had taught them to him in the first place…

“You wouldn’t understand.” If Nolio’s voice had been small, Graal’s was miniscule. No longer committed to maintaining any pretense, the old don succumbed to the fear which hasd been lurking just beneath the surface of his bravado. His former student had never seen him this way, his imposing mass suddenly magnifying the great man’s impotence.

“Why?” At this moment Graal realized that they were not alone on the balcony. Several black-robed figures had emerged from the darkness – agents of the SPQV, as unmistakable as sharks in a wading pool – with an armed guard in tow.

Tivoli Graal slumped his broad shoulders and said nothing as the phalanx of bureaucats moved in quickly and the guard fitted him with a pair of steel manacles. He listened in silence as the head agent charged him with a host of market violations and tried not to think about the fact that every eye on the trading floor was now on him. For one brief instant the City stopped and watched one of her most beloved fall from grace.

“Why, maestro, why?” Nolio kept asking this one simple question, but his entreaty fell on deaf ears. As the SQPVs lead Graal away in chains, the old don gave his former student one last look, equal parts admiration and something else that the boy couldn’t place, and whispered one word before he disappeared with his captors.

That word – a name -- made the young troubleshooter’s blood run cold, for it was the same name that the Iskandalonian had scrawled onto a fragment of papyrus and shoved into his pocket when he embraced him in the Forum of Lost Numbers. A name that he had discovered over and over again in his investigation, although it corresponded to no one he knew of:

Rosario.

Nolio stood on the balcony for what seemed an eternity, watching blankly as the traders slowly resumed their business on the exchange floor. When at last the light of the rising sun began to overtake the glow of the fungus lamps and the merchants started arriving en masse for the day’s business, he left to find a telltale ’21 Magliozzi waiting for him by the canalside.

“Rough night?” its gondolier asked.

Nolio looked at Evangelina, who didn’t appear to have gotten much sleep herself since they’d parted company, and grunted.

“Want to talk about it?”

“Not really,” Nolio admitted; Evangelina laughed.

“Let’s go down to the market and find ourselves some breakfast.”

Sighing, the young troubleshooter clambered into the gondola and Evangelina pushed off into the thickening early morning traffic. Preparing herself to ride in silence, she was surprised when Nolio spoke:

“I remember when I was a kid the first time I pointed out an error in my father’s ledger. He was so mad at me that he took one of the birch switches we’d use in the brine pools and beat me until I bled. The salt stung so bad in my cuts, but the pain was nothing compared to my confusion. Why had I upset him? Shouldn’t he have been happy that his boy was bright enough to help his dad in such a way? But he never explained himself, and I kept my corrections to myself after that for a very long time.

“For years I had been convinced that my dad had been cooking his books and squirreling his money away somewhere. What did I know? Perhaps he had a mistress, or a terrible gambling addiction at Alandi. But as time went by I began to understand that he was just a proud man who’d been embarrassed by his know-it-all son, so much so that his only response was blind rage.”

Nolio paused as Evangelina threaded her way through the downtown gridlock. The casual and irregular traffic of the night had now fully given way to a jumble of dhows, barges, and scows of varying sizes and apparent seaworthiness, but the girl found a way with an expert hand. The mathemagician wondered at how this girl had become so proficient in what was largely a man’s skill, and despaired that she herself might not be able to explain it if pressed to do so.

“It’s funny,” he continued. “I think I had expected Tivoli to react as my father had. But it was just the opposite, really. It was almost as if he were proud of me that I’d figured it out.”

Now it was Evangelina’s turn to speak unexpectedly. “You know he has a daughter, right?”

“What?” Nolio’s mind stopped in midthought.

“It’s amazing what a father might do to protect his child.”

“Of course,” the young troubleshooter said, the pieces of the puzzle suddenly falling into place. The simplest explanation once again, right in front of his face. Now he understood why Graal had expected him all along, not to corroborate the old man’s ruse but to see through it. As Nolio’s mind began to launch into a series of fevered calculations concerning this mysterious and malevolent Rosario, however, Evangelina interrupted him once more.

“That goes for your father as well, you know.”

The troubleshooter looked back at his gondolier, who stood impassive with the punt in her hand. She was right, of course. Shipping him off to the City was the best thing his father could have done for either of them, even though it had meant sacrificing his only child. What Nolio had always understood as an act of fear was suddenly recast in the guise of love. But had there not been fear in his maestro’s eyes as well? The more the young mathemagician thought about it, the more his head hurt.

Numbers were so much simpler.

Chapter Five: Bond

2010-03-20T17:33:00.000-07:00

It was times like this that Deccio Solamni wished he were a hit man. Killing people was easy – you pulled the trigger of your crossbow and collected your paycheck, simple as that. Sure, you might have to get a little bloody if you were a lousy shot and had to finish the job by hand, but a real professional dealt in swift and painless death.

Solamni however was a bounty hunter, which means that he had to not only track his quarry but bring them back alive to face their creditors, who had nothing better to do than to dream up new ways to punish those foolish or desperate enough to skip a bond. Whereas a skilled assassin could murder a man in his sleep, a bounty hunter had no choice but to render his prey alive and kicking, all the while begging for mercy and pleading for a second chance, neither of which it was his place to grant.

Solamni had been tracking this one for the better part of a week: a stonemason from the Varony who had signed on for a two-month stint rowing on a galley but skipped out on the bond after having collected the down payment for his labor. This was such a common scam that many of the smaller merchant houses had little choice but to eat their losses and hope that enough honest souls actually showed up to man the oars, but this mason had picked the wrong outfit to try and cheat.

House Davroulean paid bounty hunters good money to round up their skipped bonds and deliver them to the SPQVs, those merciless arbiters of contract law in the City. Most would be forced to pay a fine, whereas repeat offenders might be remanded to the offended House as slave labor for several years. Solamni didn’t know his quarry’s past record, nor did he want to -- details like this only made his job more difficult. All he knew was that the man he’d been tracking was holed up in a tavern on the West End near the Flats, where he was doubtless attempting to book discreet passage back to the mainland. At least he’d been smart enough not to try the ferries at Terminalia.

It was after midnight and the transit barges were virtually empty as Solamni made his passage in silence, hopping from the ox-driven paddlewheel that ceaselessly plied the length of the Grand Canal for one of the manpowered local boats. The pilot, happy to have some company at this hour, tried to make conversation with the bounty hunter, but his passenger’s grunted, monosyllabic replies made the effort sufficiently unrewarding that he gave up a couple of stops into his route and tilled the water in resentful silence.

Solamni didn’t mean to be antisocial, but idle conversation was a distraction he couldn’t afford – not in his line of work. How many times had his quarry evaded him by a split second, when his head was turned and his thoughts were elsewhere? Better to seem rude than miss the catch, even if the boatmen called him an asshole under their breath as this one did.

The West End was where the City met the tidal marshes, an old neighborhood that was home to clammers and fishermen who worked the Bay of Skulls for their daily denar. The flat-bottomed boats moored throughout the parish were equally unsuited for canalgoing and the open seas, but they were perfect for gliding along the treacherous shifting silt of the bay.

The River Varo wound its way down from a mountain stream on the slopes of the Tiglarnan Highlands, a spur of the World’s Spine that formed the natural boundary between the Varony and the domain of Iskandalon, for several hundred miles before emptying itself into the sea in a broad delta. Depending on the tides, it was almost possible to walk from the mainland to the West End– Solamni remembered the story about an invading army that had attempted just such a foolish marsh during an Eieronian low tide, only to get itself mired in the soft bay floor and swept away by the incoming tidal bore when that trickster moon suddenly changed its course.

Clammers who braved the Flats on foot did so by stationing posts driven deep into the muck with ladders and platforms where they could wait out the fickle waters, but even then there were channels that were passable only at the lowest of tides. If his bond had known enough about the marshes and the ways of Eieron to make his escape without a boat, then he would already be gone. But Solamni’s quarry was from the Varony, just as he himself was. Most mainlanders couldn’t read a tide chart if their lives depended on it.

As Solamni disembarked from the local ferry, he took stock of his surroundings with a wary eye. These old Varonian neighborhoods tended to unnerve him, and the West End was one of the oldest. Whereas many parishes were flush with new faces and new races as the City embraced the world, some of its corners were stubbornly resistant to change. Had the bounty hunter set foot here a thousand years ago, he suspected that he would be looking upon the same houses, the same storefronts, the same suspicious glares from the same salt-weathered people. Solamni began to worry. If his quarry had friends in the West End, this might be harder than he had first assumed.

Almost unconsciously he began to check his equipment, from his specialty manacles to a heavy crossbow fitted with a man-catching grapple that hooked its target like a fish. Loose-fitting charcoal Ferrari drag concealed a shirt of chainmail and a Marine broadsword that hung from his belt, two items from his previous life that served him well here in his new line of work but made him stand out all the more here in this sleepy fishing parish.

Solamni strode deliberately past silent men pretending to mend their nets and moved towards the brightest lights spilling out onto the dark quay – as he suspected, the tavern was one of the only few establishments still open at this hour. He was hoping not to have to ask directions so as not to tip off his quarry, and no sooner did he walk through the door of the nameless watering hole than he saw a man at the other end of the room practically jump out of his chair, falling over onto the floor as he started.

The bounty hunter almost laughed at this, but checked himself and closed the distance between himself and his quarry, readying his manacles as he did so. It was funny how these chases went. After a week of tracking this stonemason across the City he had expected more of a showdown at the end, but that’s not how this business worked. Some days it was an honest to goodness fight from beginning to end, and other days—

THUNK!

The bounty hunter never saw it coming: a cast-iron frying pan, still cooling down after the late evening meal no less. Had the barmaid not scored only a glancing blow, she would have knocked Solamni unconscious, or perhaps even killed him. As it was the force of the swing sent him toppling over the body of his fugitive stonemason, who struggled beneath him like a trapped animal, blindly kicking and gouging in an attempt to free himself.

Solamni tried to restrain his quarry’s flailing arms, mindful of the other person swinging twenty pounds of hot iron. The mason managed to sink his fingers into the bounty hunter’s face, just missing his left eye but raking his nails painfully into the flesh of his cheek nonetheless. Solamni jerked away with a curse and took another swing from the frying pan, which seared his togs and bruised his shoulder. At this point instinct triumphed over chivalry and he lunged towards the woman, connecting with her legs as she raised her makeshift weapon to brain him yet again— she crumpled with a cry and the iron pan fell to the floor with a heavy thud.

As Solamni rose to his feet, he saw that the tavern’s remaining clientele had not taken kindly to his rough treatment of the waitstaff. Half a dozen fishermen of varying levels of inebriation closed in, interposing themselves between him and the stonemason, who was scrambling away as fast as he could. The most burly-looking of the West Enders drew a boning knife and growled: “You’re not welcome here, bounty hunter.”

Deccio Solamni laughed. “I’m not welcome anywhere. Now let me pass and do my job.”

“Or else what?” By this time the burly fisherman’s drinking buddies had all produced blades of their own.

The bounty hunter unslung the heavy crossbow from his back so quickly that he caused the throng to take two steps back in surprise. He trained his weapon on his burly adversary’s face. “Ever see what one of these things does at close range? It isn’t pretty.”

The burly fisherman raised both of his hands in a gesture of submission, as did the others. The barmaid however had retrieved her cast iron pan and advanced on Solamni yet again, pushing through the circle of men as she did so.

“Are you going to shoot me, bounty hunter?” she cried out, her voice quavering.

Solamni kept his crossbow trained on the lead fisherman, but looked directly at the woman, who had tears in her eyes.

“Please, you can’t take him away.”

This was the part that he hated the most. Solamni steeled himself and said nothing.

“He’s going to be a father.”

Great, Solamni thought. Not only did I tackle a woman, but I tackled a pregnant one to boot.

“Maybe the SPQVs will take that into consideration.”

“Bastard!” The West End barmaid flung the frying pan at the bounty hunter, but he dodged it with a quick side-step. If he wasted any more time here, the stonemason would have ample time to escape, and the hunt would have to begin afresh. Solamni was already two months behind on his rent, and lest he be forced to draw a bond and skip it himself he really needed to make this collar tonight.

“I’m sorry,” he murmured to the pregnant barmaid. “But if I don’t bring him in, someone else will.”

This was always Solamni’s trump card in standoffs such as this. He didn’t need to embellish the implied threat it contained, because most Canalsiders knew damned well that bounty hunters got paid no matter what they delivered to the SPQVs – someone alive and kicking, or a stone cold corpse.

While not licensed to kill, those charged with hunting down skipped bonds were permitted to use whatever force necessary to carry out their business. In a City as dangerous as Varo, the fine line between acceptable violence and manslaughter was easily crossed, and the SPQVs were less interested in blood guilt as they were upholding the almighty bond of the contract.

The barmaid tried to give Solamni a hard glare through her tears, but knowing that he spoke the truth her eyes were suddenly pleading instead. “If I call him here, promise you won’t hurt him?”

Solamni nodded; the woman closed her eyes, sighed, and bade her lover to come out. The stonemason was still hiding in the tavern, and seemed as weary of running as his persuer was of chasing. After embracing the mother of his child soon to be born, he turned to face Solamni with outstretched arms and a look of resignation on his face.
The bounty hunter could tell just from his quarry’s body language that this was not his first offense, and that it might be years before the mason saw his love and their child.

Briefly he thought to himself, why not let them go? If they left for the Varony tonight, perhaps Davroulean would write off the bond. But Solamni knew that they wouldn’t. House Davroulean was entirely without mercy and they paid well, which made them a bounty hunter’s best friend. But it also meant that the stonemason would be a wanted man, and professional manhunters operating outside the City wouldn’t blink at just delivering his head to the nearest trade colony.

Of course his was all just so much rationalization on his part. If Solamni let them go, he wouldn’t get paid, and despite all of his pretense at being a kinder and gentler breed of bounty hunter it was the bounty that he was after in the end. He traded no less in misery than his more violent colleagues– he was simply better at fooling himself that he was doing his poor runaways a favor by being the one who caught them.

Perhaps if he were the sort of person given to introspection, this insight would have occurred to him, but as Solamni at last snapped the manacles on his quarry any lingering sense of doubt was lost in the euphoria of the capture. He left before the barmaid could make another scene (or throw another heavy cooking implement) and the fishermen regained their courage, his bond firmly in tow.

To his credit the stonemason did not say a word on the ride back to the Old Quarter, where Solamni remanded his catch to the SPQVs, but somehow that made it even worse. He collected his denars from a tired clerk as two black-armored guards lead the fugitive through a doorway en route to some subterranean holding cell until the magistrates awoke in the morning and determined a fitting punishment for violating his contract.

Just before the mason disappeared into the darkness below he met Solamni’s gaze. Was that forgiveness he saw in his quarry’s eyes? The bounty hunter turned his head away sharply until the man was gone.

Solamni sighed and trudged off to the nearest watering hole, a tavern called The Restless Eye that was favored by his fellow manhunters on their way to and from the ancient palazzo that housed the SPQV. An abbreviation of the Old Varonian phrase denoting the Senate and People of Varo – Senatus Populusque Varonicus – SPQV now referred to the body that made every business transaction conducted in the City legal. The so-called SPQVs were its agents, brutally efficient and legendarily incorruptible. They too liked to frequent the Eye, although they tended to keep to themselves, sitting around their own sequestered tables in quiet, hunched circles.

The bounty hunter looked up and down the long brass rail of the bar, and happy that he didn’t recognize anyone but the barkeep tonight sat down and ordered himself a carafe of the house firewater.

“Pipecleaner, Foggio.”

The barkeep poured the drink from a mysterious unlabeled container beneath the bar, all the while staring at the purple lump that had sprouted like a mushroom out of his customer’s head. “Madon’! What did you do tonight, Solamni – go to the Blues game?”

“Huh?”

“Come on! You didn’t hear about the riot? They were playing the Orangemen. Someone took a swing at one of the velvet damins and all hell broke loose.”

“Huh.” Stabientia, once the heart of Old Varo, was now a hub for organized crime, but seldom did that kind of violence erupt in a public venue. No sooner had started to worry if his brother Ottavio had been involved in any of the recent unpleasantness than a gruff but familiar voice hailed him from behind.

“Solamni! I thought I smelled something.”

The bounty hunter didn’t look up from his carafe of aquavit. “Heijun.”

A middle-aged Cebalese man sat down next to Solamni. Although well into his fifties, Heijun Kiin had that air of perpetual youth about him, even as a hard life etched itself unmistakably into his features. In the style of those men hailing from the isle of Cebal, he shaved his grey pate almost bald, gathering what hair remained into a top knot adorned with a clip of carved whalebone; his forehead and bare skull bore the tattoos unique to his clan, a living declaration of not just his ancestry but of who his friends and enemies were. The Cebalese had a well-deserved reputation for their brutality, but not everyone knew that they reserved the coldest of steel for their fellow islanders.

Heijun was a privateer, and a damned successful one at that. Under the aegis of a host of poorly-understood regulations and wielding a dozen or so letters of marque from various Houses the Cebalese captain had carved out a living preying upon the shipping lanes of the north, careful to hew as closely to the letter of what passed for law in the Sea of Sunken Hopes.

Using the SPQVs as his guide, he would attack merchants whose licenses had recently expired or Houses that had recently been sanctioned for various contract violations.
In essence Heijun was a bounty hunter on the high seas, and not surprisingly was just as beloved among semi-licit traders as Solamni was with skipped bondsmen. Even after the SPQVs got their cut, this kind of legal piracy paid far better than bonafide lawlessness.

“Picking up or dropping off?” Heijun sat down next to Solamni and nodded to Foggio, who poured him a glass of expensive Salumar brandy.

“Dropping off,” Solamni grunted. “Another damned oarsman.”

The Cebalese captain cackled, his black eyes twinkling. “The sea isn’t for everyone. I bet half your jumpers don’t even need the money, but spook at the prospect of nine months on the water.”

Solamni considered this and downed what was left in his carafe. Heijun gestured to the barkeep to replenish it on his denar.

“Why do I get the feeling that this isn’t a free refill?”

To his credit, Heijun cut to the chase: “The Fortuna is putting out in three days and I could use some extra muscle.”

“I’m more bruises than muscles these days, didn’t you notice?”

Heijun looked at the bounty hunter’s head and grimaced. “All that and how much did you get paid for your trouble?”

Solamni shrugged. “I get by.”

“You could be doing a lot better than getting by.”

The bounty hunter knew this was true, but said nothing nevertheless. Solamni had not gone into this line of work expecting it to be a permanent state of affairs, but he never seemed to clear enough money to contemplate anything different. His brother had offered on multiple occasions to set him up with a job down around the Three Parishes, but he feared that Otto’s idea of a honest denar would land him in jail or get him shot in the back.

Deccio never judged his elder sibling for the choices he had made after leaving the family homestead back in the Varony-- nor did Ottavio with his, for that matter-— but just the same he was reluctant to become enmeshed in something more unpleasant than his current gig. More to the point, Solamni was too proud to accept help, even from his black sheep of a brother. And the Cebalese’s offer, however tempting, felt more like an act of charity than a legitimate business opportunity.

“Maybe,” the bounty hunter croaked, draining his carafe again.

Heijun Kiin laughed. “Well, if you change your mind you’ll know where to find us. Fair enough? I’d love to stay and watch you get potted but I’ve got to find that no-good accountant of mine before we set sail. Foggio, put the rest of that lamp oil on my tab, capisce?”

“Careful,” the barkeep warned. “That’s home-made rotgut, I’ll have you know.”

“Your mother, she must be so proud of you.”

Foggio couldn’t help but snicker at this as he refilled Solamni’s glass yet again and Heijun Kiin left the Eye as abruptly as he entered:

“Buona fortuna, bounty hunter. In the meantime maybe you should invest in a good helmet!”

---

Solamni awoke with a pounding headache to the sounds of heavy iron woks being slammed around the restaurant he lived under. He vaguely remembered stumbling home to find his door padlocked and what few possessions he owned piled atop the eatery’s trash midden and carrying on an animated shouting match with his landlord, the owner of the Shan-li restaurant, who was tired of his deadbeat barbarian of a tenant.

The bounty hunter had exhausted his repertoire of Middle Kingdom gutter talk before proffering a wad of cash large enough to cover both his missed rent and several months of payment in advance, at which point the old Shan-li relented and gave him the key to the new lock. He didn’t even bother retrieving his junk from the trash before collapsing in a heap on a reed mat, getting up briefly to fight the Oguntak garbagemen for his dirty laundry and a panoply of second-hand weaponry.

As the smell of stir-frying meat wafted into his tiny bedroom, a suddenly ravenous Solamni realized with a groan that he had given his landlord his last cyp during last night’s drunken negotiations. Although he might be able to coax a pork bun out of the kitchen staff – the owner’s daughter was sweet on him and always good for a free albeit greasy breakfast – Solamni was going to have to make another collar in order not to starve this week. Normally he liked to take a few days’ off between jobs, but with no cash even for the ferries he wouldn’t be afforded such a luxury this time.

Great.

Having lost his washbasin and mirror to the Oguntak bargemen, he licked his palms to slick down his hair, careful to avoid the pulpy knot where the West End barmaid had brained him, and headed back to the Old Quarter, munching on a leftover pastry that had been wrapped up by his not-so-secret admirer in an origami swan.

The same clerk was on duty when Solamni returned to the SPQV building. Didn’t these guys ever sleep? The bureaucrat recognized the bounty hunter and allowed him to pass into the long colonnade to the right of the desk, opposite the other entrance that lead downstairs into the darkness.

Solamni wondered briefly if the mason had been allowed to pay a fine and be on his way, or whether he was still in chains somewhere beneath his feet, bound for an unspecified period of servitude aboard a Davroulean galley. He’d heard from a trustworthy source in the House that Davroulean deployed their deadbeat bondsmen along some of the most dangerous and unforgiving shipping routes, from the frozen Aeedian coast to the shoals of Sûl. Solamni shook his head as if to dislodge this morbid and frankly unproductive train of thought, but he only managed to make his pounding headache worse.

By day the old palazzo buzzed with humanity, and as Solamni walked along the marble portico various clerks, magistrates, scribes crisscrossed his path from one office to another under the watchful gaze of black-armored guards. Some were clad in the unmistakable plain gray robes favored by the SPQV, but there were just as many liaisons and attaches from the Great Houses, the Varonian Senate, the parochial cittadini,and even foreign businessmen, all of them working tirelessly either to secure the requisite blessings for their endeavors or to undermine those of their rivals in the marketplace.

Solamni did his best to affect indifference to these comings and goings and turned right at the third junction, walking almost straight into a trade mission from Tiglarno, consisting of a dozen matriarchs and their all-female honor guard. The bounty hunter tried to mutter an apology, but his tongue tripped over the words in the overwhelming presence of the Tiglarnans, whose rulers were as beautiful as they were fierce on the field of battle.

Red-faced, he escaped the two dozen pairs of mocking eyes only to find himself in the midst of another delegation from the Palmlands, where bald priests clad in purple escorted a veiled figure whom the rest of the hallway was giving a wide berth. A gorgon! Solamni had only seen these terrifying beings from afar, but here he was, as face to face as a mortal can come to a medusa and live to tell about it.

The gorgon lifted her hand and the acolytes paused; Solamni stood petrified opposite the woman in the veil until at last she spoke:

“Don’t I know you?”

The bounty hunter blinked uncomprehendingly. He had never spoken to a gorgon in his life! Surely she must have him confused with someone else, but his tongue – already tied in knots by the Tiglarnan matriarchs – refused to comply, so all he managed was to wag his head lamely in a negative manner.

The gorgon drew nearer, as if to examine him more closely. Now Solamni could hear the faint sound of hissing from beneath the veil. He tried to keep his gaze from her face, but the shadowy profile was too hypnotic to resist. The fact that a thin square of fabric was all that kept him from viewing the medusa’s visage in all of its terrible naked glory seemed to make his heart pound audibly. Whether or not anyone else in the entourage could feel it, the bounty hunter knew that she could, and that the gorgon was savoring his terror.

“What is your name, child?” Her reptilian tongue slithered as she spoke, causing everyone within earshot to shiver.

Through some miracle Solamni found himself able to speak again: “K-K-Solamni. Deccio Solamni.”

“Solamni,” the gorgon said, as if the name were the answer to an impossible riddle. “Yes, of course. She is waiting for you.”

“What?”

“She needs you.”

Solamni opened his mouth as if to speak, then closed it again, completely at a loss for words.

The veiled woman laughed and motioned to her entourage. “Don’t worry, you’ll figure it out soon enough, this I promise. And Queen Cariebasa always keeps her promises!”

As the purple-clad acolytes escorted Solamni from the Gorgon queen, he could feel the conversation take on the elusive quality of a dream upon waking. The Queens of Chocolate were not only medusae but powerful sorceresses, such that even when they did not employ the magical arts their very presence could leave most mortals feeling confused and bewildered.

She is waiting for you. As the encounter faded from his memory, those five words lingered, their sibilant cadence thumping in his skull as surely as his headache. Who was waiting? Solamni looked around him in hope of an answer, but there was only empty causeway. With a sigh the bounty hunter shrugged and continued down the hall, almost as if his meeting with Cariebasa had not transpired.

Almost.

“You again?”

Seraglio DeMedici raised his eyebrows at Deccio Solamni as he walked into the Foro del Lupi, or the Wolves’ Market. Here the Great Houses sold their skipped bonds to collection agents, who were in turn empowered to hire bounty hunters under the watchful eye of the SPQVs. Most professionals relied on a single agent to provide them with a steady steam of business, and DeMedici had been Solamni’s contact in the Wolves’ Market ever since he’d entered the manhunting business.

By this time Solamni had mostly succeeded in shaking off his encounter with the medusa and managed to regain a businesslike composure. “Need a quick turnaround, Seraglio. Got anything?”

The broker looked at the bounty hunter’s bruised head over his octagonal spectacles. “Let me guess, you lost it all betting on the Orangemen.”

“Funny. That’s the second time I’ve heard that joke. Do I look like a hooligan?”

Seraglio snorted. “Well I know it isn’t woman troubles. And even you couldn’t have possibly drunk that much in one night. The Davroulean job paid well-- are you in some kind of money trouble yourself?”

“No.”

The broker looked unconvinced. “Mmm-hmm. Don’t think that because we’re business partners I won’t hire someone to run your sorry ass down if I hear your name on the trading floor.”

“I appreciate your concern.”

Seraglio ignored his bounty hunter’s customary sarcasm and riffled the stack of papers on his desk, which stood to the far left of the foro, which encompassed what was once a very large ballroom for the Old Varonian family that had originally called this palace home. Solamni tried to remember their name, but it escaped him. He wondered if anyone else in the building knew. The City seemed to have a knack for forgetfulness, especially where history was concerned.

“All right,” Seraglio interrupted Solamni’s silent reverie. “I’ve got one for you. A starving artist in the Gearhouse. Climb a few stairs and he’s all yours.”

Solamni grunted. “What kind of bond did he skip?”

“Now it matters all of a sudden?” the broker mocked him pitilessly. “You’re not going soft on me now, are you? You are my best earner.”

“The Gearhouse?”

“Yeah. Get your portrait painted while you’re up there. Just be sure they leave out that nasty lump on your head.”

The bounty hunter winced and gingerly patted his bruise. “Looks that bad, huh?”

Seraglio smiled. “Actually I was talking about your face. On a mug like yours, a big purple welt is a net improvement.”

“Thanks.”

“Now get out of here and make me some money. You owe me one.”

Solamni didn’t like being in anyone’s debt, least of all his employer’s. But he nodded his assent and took the sheaf of papyrus that Seraglio handed to him. This was the bounty hunter’s warrant, and it always contained three pieces of information -- the name of the skipped bond, that of the aggrieved House, and the quarry’s last known location – as well as the official stamp of the SPQV. Any additional information was extraneous at best, and counterproductive or even dangerous at worst.

Eager to put some denars and minars back in his pocket, Solamni decided he knew enough to make the catch, although the name of Great House was something of a mystery to him: Rosario. He’d never run down a skipped bond for this house before, nor could he conjure up a mental picture of who they were and what they did. Granted, there were a lot of smaller Houses out there, but after a year or so in the business Solamni had hunted down bondsmen for pretty much everyone. Or so he had thought. A job was a job, however, and as much as Solamni enjoyed a good mystery he hoped to have his man back here before any of these nagging details could catch up with him.

The Gearhouse was a squatters’ nest in Hightown popular among dropouts and struggling artists. This meant he was going to have to drag his own sorry carcass up those famed thousand and one steps and then back down again with an extra two hundred pounds, a prospect which made him crankier than he normally was when on the job. The bounty hunter made his ascent just after sunset, hoping to catch his skipped bond shortly heading out to yet another all-night party amid the villas of Varo’s elite.

Hightown was home to enough rich and idle persons that the poets and painters who inhabited the Gearhouse never wanted for patronage, and bored Senators and their wives never ran out of fresh young talent to fawn over and spend their money on. Solamni wasn’t even halfway up the cliff and his lungs were burning from the effort. It probably didn’t help that he was loaded down with the equipment and attire that was peculiar to his profession, which made a vertical climb such as this a grueling prospect. Nevertheless he grunted and cursed his way to the top, passing the odd vendor hauling a load of produce or fish up the steps or an early reveler stumbling his way down in a drunken stupor.

Solamni at last reached the top of the landing. Pausing only a moment to catch his breath, he was nevertheless almost immediately accosted by a throng of bohemians who infested Hightown’s boulevards by night as sure as clients lined those same streets during the day. Some were artists, others were courtesans, and who knows what the rest of them were, but all of them were already very drunk.

“Sketch your profile, signeur? Two cyps while you wait.”

“Looking for a good time? I’ve got a girlfriend. And a boyfriend, if that’s your thing.”

“Decc?”

Solamni froze, his hand instinctively moving to the hilt of his broadsword. To the best of his knowledge, no one should have known where he was this evening. He scanned the crowd of wasted youth looking for an obvious threat, while steadying himself against a possible ambush from the circle of darkness beyond.

“Solamni! I’m talking to you.”

The bounty hunter now recognized the voice, and couldn’t believe his ears. “Joker?”

A familiar figure emerged from the throng: a large bear of a man with broad shoulders and smiling eyes, dressed improbably in the raiment of the clergy. “Well, round these parts I go by Father Rondolo.”

Solamni snorted. “You? A priest! Well, now I’ve heard everything.”

“If you’ll recall, I did serve as our unit’s chaplain.”

“Yeah, but I thought that was to get out of mess duty.”

The two men grinned at each other. “So what brings you to my parish, Solamni?”

“I’m hunting down a skipped bond.”

“Ah.” Solamni wasn’t quite sure, but he thought he detected a hint of disappointment in the priest’s voice. Or was it something else? The bounty hunter’s investigational skills were sharpening with every successful hunt, with the result that he now began to trust his instincts in such matters. “How’s that working out?”

Solamni shrugged. “It’s a living.”

“I suppose it is. Though I pity anyone who ends up in that kind of mess.”

“Are you talking about them, or me?”

“Perhaps a little of both.”

The bounty hunter actually laughed at this. “You haven’t lost your touch, Joker."

“A sense of humor is the key to living a spiritual life.”

This made more sense than Solamni would have imagined, had someone else said it. “So how’s that working out?”

Rondolo beamed. “Are you kidding? I’ve got some of the best real estate in all of the City, and all I have to do is preach to an empty church every week.”

“Not much need for God here on the Rock, eh?”

“Just the opposite, really. Their souls are starved, just like everywhere else. But in Hightown there are so many other ways to feed that hunger, at least temporarily.”

“Such as?”

The priest spread his hands wide. “Do you have time to split a bottle with an old Marine? I have a whole cellar full of communion wine that isn’t going to drink itself anytime this century.”

Solamni hesitated. Although he was in a hurry, perhaps Rondolo could help him navigate the bohemian byways and steer him in the right direction of his quarry. Otherwise he could be blundering around Hightown all night and still not find his man.

“All right,” the bounty hunter grinned. “But no matter how drunk you get me, I’m not going to be your altar boy-- capisce?”

Father Rondolo laughed heartily and lead the way to his church. “No offense, Solamni, but you’re not my type.”

Deccio Solamni had not seen Rondolo since the day that they’d both mustered out of the Marines four years ago, after returning from Deltaine. Back then he was still a kid from the Varony who’d grown a little too big for his britches and the farm back home, so he signed up for a tour of duty with the Varonian Marines. Although it was entirely possible for a Marine to go through his enlistment without so much as picking up a crossbow, let alone using it, Solamni had the great misfortune of getting caught up in the grand sweep of history.

For no sooner had Minax the Idiot been installed as the new Korumani Emperor than his advisors – such as they were – sent him headlong into a conflict with Varonian interests by invading Eastern Salumaria, a region as rich in history as it was in strategic importance, as from its ruin-studded shores the Korumani could successfully harass the City’s most important trade route between the Great Basin and the Southlands.

The Doge and Varonian Senate responded to this Imperial threat with an invasion of their own, storming not just the beaches of Old Salumar but pressing into the Empire’s westernmost provinces as well to cut off any hope of maintaining supply lines during the conflict -- this was Deltaine, a rocky peninsula dotted with cranberry bogs and ancestral villas.

It was here that Solamni and his young comrades encountered the god of war in his twin aspects, between the ordered and predictable tactics of the Imperial regulars and the stealthy maneuvers of local partisans who fought both with intimate knowledge of their homeland as well as the ready willingness to perform awful deeds to defend it. The Marines gave back in kind, making for a particularly nightmarish campaign that dragged along until the Emperor’s advisors realized the magnitude of their miscalculations and sued for peace so that the Korumani war machine could return its attentions to quelling the multiplying insurrections on the eastern frontier.

The City brought her forces home, sending an army of carpetbaggers in their stead who would turn a quick profit on the spoils of war and leave the region slightly worse than they had originally found it. Many of the Marines had mustered out then and there to share in the opportunity, but Solamni’s platoon had seen and done too much for any of them to want to stay in Deltaine for any longer than necessary. After returning to Varo they went their separate ways, and although Deccio had meant to keep in touch the time slipped away from him. Perhaps if he had chosen a different calling, things would have turned out differently.

Rondolo had always been the kid with a sense of humor, even when things were at their worst. Unable to beat this personality quirk out of him during basic training, their drill sergeant dubbed him “Joker,” and the nickname stuck. Even now Rondolo wore that broad smile and laughed heartily as he showed Solamni around the empty Hightown church which he now called home and brought him up to speed on the comings and goings of his old comrades over a fine bottle of Giotto red:

“Now Petrarch, he’s here in the City. Last I heard, he was kicking around Marilia.”

“Marilia?” Solamni looked up from his cup. “That’s where my brother Otto is. He keeps on telling me to come down there and set up shop with him.”

Rondolo nodded at this. “So why don’t you?”

“And leave all this?” the bounty hunter joked, sweeping his arms widely; the priest chuckled, but only briefly, as if to suggest that he still hadn’t answered the question. Solamni, sensing this, sighed but offered nothing more.

“Look,” Rondolo said. “I’m hardly one to be telling anyone what he should do with his life, but in your case I’ll take my chances. How do you think this is going to end for you?”

Solamni drank his wine a little too quickly for its vintage, causing him to scowl. “I’m not thinking that far ahead, Joker. I can’t.”

“You were always the worst liar, Decc.”

“And you can’t shepherd anyone to save your life,” Solamni retorted with a snort. “No wonder your church is empty!”

Joker’s smiled, his youthful face already worn with the grooves of an overly expressive soul. “So who is it that you’re chasing up here, anyway? I may not appear to have much of a flock, but I can assure you that I know most of the lost souls who call the Gearhouse home.”

“Tiberio d’Allamici.”

Solamni did not anticipate Father Rondolo’s reaction to the name he recited, but he caught the flicker of apprehension that it provoked before the priest was able to recover his grin. “Mmm-hmm. I’m not sure if I know this one. What’s the bond?”

“Dunno, actually. But the house is Rosario. Ever hear of those guys?”

“No,” Rondolo lied. His face had gone as white as a sheet. Solamni was almost thinking he’d call his old war buddy’s bluff, but Rondolo’s stricken demeanor gave him pause. In fact, he could feel his own pulse quicken at the sudden terror he sensed.

“Well,” the bounty hunter stood uneasily, the potent red wine taking its toll on a half-empty stomach. “I’ve taken up enough of your time with business. It was nice catching up with you, Joker.”

The normally smooth-talking priest could barely stammer out his words: “Y-y-you too, Decc.” He followed his guest with a curious mixture of relief and anxiety, and when he had successfully escorted his friend out the front door of the church Solamni could hear him barring the door as it closed between them.

Everything about this was wrong. Solamni wanted nothing more than to batter down the heavy doors and make Rondolo tell him what was going on, but he suspected that even then he wouldn’t get anything meaningful out of the priest. So he would have to brave the Gearhouse on his own after all. The bounty hunter grunted, feeling the alcohol in his blood ward off the evening chill, and made his way across the empty piazza towards the hulking structure that loomed over Hightown’s sheerest precipice like a giant catamount waiting to pounce.

Centuries of neglect had taken its toll on the structure, but despite its frayed cables and rusted pulleys the foundation of the Gearhouse was steady enough to support what would be a small city anywhere else on the Three Continents. There was a grand foyer meant to serve as the entrance for Hightown nobles making their aerial descent to the Old Quarter or the exit for those Senators and damins who had climbed up in the opposite direction – as Solamni ascended the gentle stairway into the massive receiving chamber he could feel a thousand eyes bore into him.

Although it was long past sunset, the squatters of the Gearhouse had festooned their ramshackle abode with myriad lights, from torches to paper lanterns to the cold blue-white globes of luminescent fungus, with the result that Solamni could easily make out the cavernous interior even though it stretched some three or four stories above his head.

Everywhere he looked he saw lofts built one upon another, with the bottommost row comprised of ancient cable cars, their stately Vrolentine ornamentation only serving to heighten the bohemian atmosphere of this place. Catwalks and stairways zig-zagged off into the darkness in every imaginable direction, and the bounty hunter despaired as he wondered how to proceed in his hunt.

He had suspected that Seraglio’s “quick” job would turn out to be nothing of the sort, but unless Solamni wanted to face another morning without so much as a cyp in his pocket he was going to have to think of something. Then he had an idea. Raising his voice so that it boomed against the crumbling masonry, he shouted:

“Signeurs e signeuras, the Greenheads are coming!”

The olive drab favored by the Varonian police had earned them the dubious moniker Greenheads, which was as much a comment on local law enforcement’s sartorial choice as it was a condemnation of their bloodsucking tendencies. Unlike the SPQVs, the Greenheads were easily bought and almost without an exception hopelessly corrupted by the competing financial interests of their parishes, which meant that those who had the most to fear from a run-in with the City’s constabulary were the poor.

Solamni figured that enough of the Gearhouse was involved in theft and other petty crimes at any given moment that the mere mention of a raid would cause them to flee, and that’s just what happened, as starving artists practically fell over one another to stampede out the main entrance and into the anonymity of the night. His quarry, however, had nothing to fear from the Greenheads, as they were powerless to uphold contract law – he would remain here, in hiding.

But it was a lot easier to find a man hiding in an empty building than one that was crawling with a few hundred unhelpful souls. Solamni moved quickly through the now-vacant quarters in search of his skipped bondsman, stopping here and there to poke at a largish pile of clothes on the floor or a half-opened footlocker.

“Tiberio?” he called out into the gloom. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way. It’s your choice.”

Just when the bounty hunter was beginning to worry that his ploy had been too effective and the fugitive had run along with the rest of the Gearhouse squatters he felt a solid fist connect with his jaw and staggered backwards. A man had been waiting for him in the dark recesses between lofts, and now that he had landed the first blow he emerged out into the open, almost surprised to see that his pursuer had not been knocked unconscious.

Deccio Solamni was surprised as well-- he had not expected a starving artist to be able to throw a punch like that. He tried to shake off the hit and squared to face his quarry, who didn’t look like any bohemian that he’d had ever met, with square shoulders, closely-cropped hair, and a shirt of mail. Solamni’s eyes fell uneasily on the hilt of the broadsword that the man had hanging from his belt, which looked exactly like his own. A Marine’s broadsword.

Before Solamni could make any sense of this the man drew his blade and advanced with a cry. He didn’t have time to ready his own weapon, so instead he lowered his head and rushed forward, crashing headlong into his quarry’s midsection and causing him to drop his broadsword, which fell with a clatter to the floor. The man responded with a knee to the bounty hunter’s groin; Solamni doubled over in a blinding flash of pain.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw his assailant scrambling to pick up his sword. Why wasn’t he running instead? They always ran. The bounty hunter whipped a throwing knife from its ankle scabbard and launched it at the man’s sword arm, connecting with the soft spot of his wrist. The man howled with pain and tried to grab the weapon with his other arm, but Solamni was up again-- with one foot he kicked the broadsword clear from the scrum, and with the other he stepped on his quarry’s fresh wound to pin him where he lay.

“Tiberio d’Allamici,” he began. “In the name of the Senate and People of Varo, I am placing you under—“

The skipped bond twisted suddenly, sweeping his legs into Solamni’s and knocking him off his feet and onto his back. As the bounty hunter tried to get up, his quarry tackled him and managed to get an arm around his neck.

Solamni was already feeling woozy from the lack of blood in his head, and fumbled lamely through one of the packs that hung on his belt. He shifted and the man improved his hold, his flexing bicep practically in Solamni’s face. There was a tattoo on his assailant’s arm – a number expressed in Old Varonian numerals:

CDXXIII.

Just as he felt the world begin to slip away, Solamni found what he was looking for: a handful of powered chile from his landlord’s kitchen, which he sprayed into his quarry’s face. The man jerked away as the incendiary spices blinded him and caused him to choke, and the bounty hunter rolled free of his grasp. As his opponent sputtered and cursed, Solamni quickly drew his sword and brought the pommel down on the back of the other man’s head, knocking him unconscious.

Solamni looked down at the skipped bond sprawled on the ground. “Sorry about that, ‘michi.” His eyes again fell on the man’s tattoo, which was still in plain sight, but before he could dwell on its significance he heard the sounds of people milling about. It would not have taken long for the Gearhouse squatters to figure out that the police were nowhere to be found, at which point Solamni would have a lot of explaining to do.

With a grimace the bounty hunter picked up the dead weight of a full-grown man, slinging him over his shoulders as best as he could and heading back out the way he came. If anyone hailed him he paid them no heed, and fortunately no one wished to challenge a bruised and bloodied man carrying another bruised and bloodied man at this time of night, so his way back out of this rat’s warren of starving artists was clear.

Solamni then grunted his way back down the Hightown steps until he could hail a passing gondolier who’d take such an unsavory-looking fare back down to the Old Quarter on credit – surprisingly it didn’t take long, which made Solamni wonder just how many bodies people were hauling down from the Rock at odd hours under mysterious circumstances.

As the gondolier punted along the dark canal humming a half-remembered melody, Deccio Solamni reached up to the tattoo on his right arm that bore the same number as the one he found on his quarry’s bicep. CDXXIII. 523rd. His bond wasn’t some deadbeat bohemian, but a Marine from his own regiment. He closed his eyes and tried to remember d’Allamici. He was definitely not a member of his platoon but now that his memory had been prompted he could swear he’d seen this man’s face about camp.

This man was a brother, a comrade in arms. Tiberio d’Allamici had slogged through the cranberry bogs of Deltaine, which the locals had flooded and littered with steel dragon traps. Step into the trap and its teeth snapped with enough force to tear a human being in half. How many Marines had died instantly on that march? And how many more had they left behind to die as they bled out from severed arms or legs, their screams of agony echoing through the foothills? His quarry had stood shoulder to shoulder with Solamni as they advanced step by step through hell on earth, only to end up on Solamni’s shoulders and delivered in a barely-breathing bundle to the SPQVs for so many denars and minars.

The bounty hunter didn’t even count his money when the same clerk handed him a thick stack of bank notes. Solamni felt numb for his efforts and left the booking office before the black-clad guards could arrive and take Tiberio down below, causing the omnipresent and usually unflappable bureaucrat to squawk. “What if he wakes up?”

Solamni slapped the Marine’s broadsword down on the clerk’s desk. “Use this. And make sure he gets it back when they’re done with him.”

“That’s not my job,” the clerk sniffed.

The bounty hunter fixed the bureaucrat with a tired but threatening gaze. “It is now. Capisce?”

The clerk gulped and nodded, and Solamni left without another word. As much as he wanted to go down to the Eye and drink this feeling away, he knew that there was something more than guilt that was eating away at him. Guilt he could drown, but underlying it was a bonafide mystery—a mystery about a name.

Solamni had trudged all the way back up the steps of Hightown to find the church’s doors exactly as he’d left them – closed and barred. He pounded away at the heavy oak for what felt like an hour calling out Rondolo’s name before giving up in disgust. As he turned to leave he became aware of the fact that someone was watching him from across the piazza.

It was a woman in a veil. For a moment the bounty hunter thought of Queen Cariebasa, but as the figure moved he could see locks of raven hair behind the sheer fabric. He tried to move closer to this mysterious woman, but no sooner did he see her than she withdrew from sight, and although Solamni tried to move quickly to catch her the sleepless night took its toll on his endurance. When he reached her vantage point she was long gone, with no sign of her escape in any direction. The bounty hunter sighed and resigned himself to another loose end, then made his way back to the last place on earth that he wanted to go right now.

With its twinkling lights and languid lost souls, the Gearhouse had a certain romantic appeal by night, but in the daylight the squalor of the place was almost overwhelming and the hunger of its resident squatters all-pervasive. Solamni steeled himself for an ugly scene upon his return, but if anyone recognized him they made no indication, instead pressing him as they would any mark with cash who entered their abode.

He shrugged off the crush of offers of cheap art and even cheaper sex and tried to retrace his steps back to where Tiberio had lain in wait for him. There he found a loft that was obviously being picked through furtively by a half a dozen bohemians, most of whom who scattered when they saw Solamni approach. One, however, held her ground – a girl who couldn’t have been much older than sixteen, fixed the bounty hunter with an indifferent stare, clearly unwilling to cede her ground to this interloper.

“What are you supposed to be?”

Solamni blinked. The question had caught him off-guard. “I’m a… friend… of Tiberio’s.”

It was a terrible lie and even the girl knew it. She laughed, “’Michi, please. T didn’t have any friends. The real question is: are you or aren’t you?”

“Am I what?” Solamni sputtered, not quite sure how he’d lost the upper hand in this conversation to a punk kid.

“Dealing, ‘michi. Are you dealing?”

Solamni’s mind began to reel as pieces of the puzzle fell into place. “Depends,” he lied more convincingly this time. “What do you need?”

The young girl fixed the bounty hunter with a stare that would come to haunt him – just beyond the brat defiance and bohemian hostility to all things Canalside there lurked a yawning hunger that Solamni could see clearly in her eyes. “What do you think I need! El Mirad, ‘michi.”

El Mirad. Solamni narrowed his eyes and nodded to himself as the girl continued:
“I was hoping that T kept an emergency stash somewhere in his bungalow, but no such luck. So you got any?”

Again, those eyes and the empty abyss behind them. Solamni looked away from the young girl and told his third lie of the conversation. “Not on me, but I can get some.”

“Good, good,” the girl said with a faraway voice. “And maybe you and I can have the same payment arrangement that I had with Tiberio, if you know what I mean.”

Solamni had been afraid of just that. “We can worry about that later, when I come back. Capisce?”

The girl nodded and the bounty hunter decided that it was time to leave before he dug himself any deeper into the bottomless pit he had stumbled upon here. “Hurry back,” the girl called to him in a voice that sent a shiver down his spine.

Solamni quickened his pace so that he could leave the Gearhouse without further incident, his healthy sense for danger that was essential to a bounty hunter’s job having taken flight only to be replaced by a smothering feeling of panic. If the City were already a claustrophobe’s worst nightmare, with soul piled upon soul separated only by thin whitewashed walls and canals so narrow you could often step across them, the Gearhouse simply dispensed with these niceties and surrendered to the press of flesh and blood. Lowtown tenements offered more room to breathe.

When he had first arrived Solamni had been able to ignore the sense of entrapment, but the longer Solamni remained within these walls, the more his panic was magnified, especially now that he knew more about his former quarry and what he’d been up to here. Surely by now enough people who had seen him carry Tiberio out over his shoulder last night recognized him on his return, and who knows what the girl was already telling her junkie friends. He had only been able to navigate through this tangle of humanity thus far because no one here knew what to make of him, but as soon as this initial surprise wore off he could quite literally drown in this sea of sunken hopes.

By the time he reached the grand concourse back out of the Gearhouse he had broken into a run – so great was his desire to leave this place that Solamni failed to notice the veiled woman from the piazza right in front of him as he pushed his way back out to the open air.

“Look out!”

Although the woman was quite tall in stature, the bounty hunter easily bowled her over with the momentum of imagined pursuit, and the two of them tumbled to the floor of the Grand Concourse in a heap much to the mirth of the squatters.

“Perdona me,” Solamni apologized first, but as he moved to extricate himself from the woman’s accidental embrace he recognized her. “You!”

The woman propped herself on an elbow unsteadily – her veil had been thrown headlong from her head in the collision, revealing a head of dark hair arranged in some intricate manner that no doubt was in fashion here among the patricians of Hightown, along with a smirk.

“Yes, me. Now are you going to stand there and stare or are you going to help a lady back onto her feet?”

Solamni stood and blinked, glancing over his shoulder towards the interior of the Gearhouse nervously. Though there was still no sign of pursuit, he knew that it would only be a matter of time. The woman noticed the bounty hunter’s discomfort and spoke in a hushed but clear voice:

“You will be safe with me. I swear it. “

Solamni met the woman’s gaze. In those crystal blue eyes he saw many things-- strength, confidence, defiance, rage – but he did not detect a hint of duplicity or guile. Although in truth Solamni could read women just about as well as he could read a book of Cherin poetry, he took a chance and stretched out his hand.

“My name is Solamni. Deccio Solamni.”

The woman grasped his hand. “I am Valeria Sulpicia. And I need your help.”

“Why do you need my help?”

“Not now,” the patrician said as a cry rung out from the shantytown. “Follow me – I know a secret way out of here!”

Solamni wondered why a Senator’s wife should know all about the Gearhouse and its hidden byways, but as the lone shout had become a general cry of alarm he set such speculations aside and concentrated on getting away without being torn to pieces by a mob of angry bohemians. Valeria tugged his hand as she moved quickly through the crowd and the two of them disappeared beneath one of the impromptu scaffolds erected along the far wall of the Grand Concourse, where a narrow staircase descended into the granite foundation.

Just as they made their way down the stairs and out of sight they could hear heavy footfalls and several voices demanding information. Valeria paused and looked back at Solamni, her eyes wide. “What were you doing in there?”

“Just asking questions.”

“Well, sounds like you asked the wrong ones.”

“Or the right ones.”

The patrician nodded. “Anyway, let’s keep moving. Someone may have noticed where we went.”

Solamni gestured for Valeria to lead the way. The stairway had deposited them onto a dimly-lit landing, its sole source of illumination an old globe of fungus whose glow had been failing for quite some time. Although the stairs continued downward into pitch darkness, Valeria pulled Solamni towards one of the several open doorways on the landing, where more forgotten light globes feebly lit a narrow passage.

“These are the old service tunnels,” Valeria explained as they squeezed between the damp granite walls. “Most of the Gearhouse’s current residents don’t even know these exist, but they can get you around the original structure fairly well.”

Before Solamni could ask the obvious question, Valeria continued: “And no, you may not ask how I know all about these tunnels. Let it suffice to say that I require a certain amount of discretion in my comings and goings about Hightown.”

The bounty hunter said nothing to this, but merely followed the patrician as she weaved her way through the semi-darkness, stopping at several junctures to choose a different tunnel, until at long last they reached a door that opened onto the cliffside wall of the Gearhouse’s ancient foundation. Cut into the almost sheer rock face was a set of stairs that lead back up to Hightown and down to the canals in a series of tight, vertiginous switchbacks.

“Don’t look down,” Valeria said a moment too late, and started climbing; Solamni followed, trying not to think of how many centuries of neglect he were beneath his feet and how far he would fall should he slip on the crumbling masonry. It was midafternoon, and the low clouds which had hugged the City all morning had broken up just enough for the sun to make a brief but dazzling appearance in the sky, casting the seascape beyond the drop in a kaleidoscope of moving light and shadow. His calves already burning from his first ascent up the Rock, Solamni tried not to grunt too loudly as he added another hundred steps insult to the day’s injury, until at long last they had reached a manmade hole in the natural stone ramparts that opened onto a nondescript alley.

Valeria, still moving quickly, zigzagged through a series of similar byways until they reached a large and ornate door set into the wall of what was clearly an ancient villa with a sleepy-looking guard keeping watch. At the sight of the patrician, however, the sentry snapped to attentiveness, and called for his unseen partner on the other side of the wall to open the door and receive the lady of the house. The senator’s wife nodded graciously and took Solamni by the arm as she made her entrance to the scrambling fanfare of her retinue.

While Solamni considered himself to be a somewhat cosmopolitan soul, during his few years living in the City he had only glimpsed true wealth from afar, or in the second- or third-hand accounts of those fortunate enough to be invited into a damin’s palace for a wedding or some other grand occasion during which the rich opened their doors to their fellow Canalsiders. But this was a different kind of opulence, as primordial as it was vast, an accumulation that began when Varo was but a tiny fishing village that huddled against the onrushing flood tide of the Raynar Horde.

The courtyard itself was like nothing Solamni had ever seen, a veritable paradise that contained species of flora and fauna from the far reaches of the Three Continents. Here was a series of salt ponds sheltering the spiny Aeedian lobster, there was a Shaqaran plane tree with a Zaa Zaa bird perched on its branch. The bounty hunter did not know any of these names or provenances, only that he’d never laid eyes on such things before—and certainly not in the City, where the closest one got to wildlife was spotting a dead dog floating on the canal.

Valeria allowed her servants to conduct her and Solamni through this garden of alien delights and into the villa, down a hallway of ancestral busts that glared disapprovingly at each successive generation and up a short stairway into a solarium that was larger than an entire tenement down below in the parishes. This bright and high-vaulted chamber had been painted in a curious manner so as to depict the view beyond each wall as if it were transparent. Although the illusion was quite convincing, Solamni couldn’t help but wonder why the artisan had not simply built the room with larger windows. Valeria gestured to one of the comfortable-looking couches at the room’s center and bade the bounty hunter to sit:

“As I promised, you are safe here. Please, relax for a spell and then we will talk.”

Solamni looked at the cushioned chair as if he could sink into it for all eternity, but remained standing nonetheless. “Much as I’d like to, I don’t have time to rest. So why don’t we cut to the chase and you can tell me why you’ve been following me ever since I arrived on the Rock?”

A not-so-small phalanx of servants had been converging upon the two of them with the obscene amount of food and drink appropriate for even an informal Hightown reception, but their guest’s brash tone slowed them into indecision. Exasperated, Valeria nodded and dismissed them with a wave, and the phalanx retreated.

“Very well,” the patrician said with a sigh. “What do you know about El Mirad?”

“Enough to know that a Senator’s wife shouldn’t be asking questions about it.”

Valeria harrumphed. “Come now. I’ve seen you with the priest and his lowlife dealer in the Gearhouse.”

“The priest?” Solamni tried to sound surprised and not surprised at the same time.

“Of course. You’re going to pretend you didn’t know?”

“Joker,” the bounty hunter whispered under his breath. “You bastard.”

“What did you say?”

“Nothing,” Solamni tried to recover his hard-boiled mien as best he could. “So why haven’t you turned him in to the Council of Eleven?”

“They won’t touch a man of the cloth,” Valeria said disgustedly. “How is that we live in a City where no one believes and yet no one dare arrest a priest?”

The bounty hunter couldn’t help but smile. “It’s the perfect cover.”

“Of course it is. With it he has destroyed the Gearhouse with impunity.”

“No offense, signeura, but it looks like it didn’t need much help in that regard.”

Valeria suddenly grew furious. “Don’t you dare presume to pass judgment on something you know nothing about! I have been a patron of the arts since before you were born. There is no place on the Three Continents like this community – it has brought indescribable beauty to an otherwise ugly pile of humanity. All of that has ground to a halt with your friend’s ‘ministry.’

“Tell me, Signeur Solamni. Have you ever tried El Mirad?”

Solamni lied and shook his head. The patrician fixed him with a stare, then continued:

“I have. It swallows a part of your soul and never returns it. Artists are drawn to it like moths to a flame, because it shows them wondrous and terrible things, but their visions can never be captured. So they try again, and again, until the drug consumes them utterly.”

“You lost someone close to you?” Solamni saw the obvious at last, and although Valeria Sulpicia said nothing her azure eyes brimmed with tears.

“He was the greatest painter of his generation. Perhaps of all time. You are sitting in the midst of his handiwork,” the patrician gestured with a wave to the false vistas that surrounded them in the solarium. “All of that came to an end when he discovered El Mirad. It killed me to watch him deteriorate, and yet it was I who kept giving him money, even when I knew what it was going to. So what kind of monster does that make me?

“He was but one victim, though, Signeur Solamni. As I tried to make sense of Mario’s death, I began to apprehend the sickness that had insinuated itself into the Gearhouse – a bottomless hunger that threatened to consume everything that made this community wonderful. And I began to take action.”

“Action?” Solamni suddenly understood. “Rosario!”

Valeria nodded, her face triumphant. “If no one would help me take down Rondolo, then at the very least I could eliminate his dealers. Damin Rosario offered his help and I took it.”

“But how? You can’t just put someone’s name out on the Wolves’ Market without a skipped bond. The SPQVs would never allow it.”

“Signeur Rosario is a powerful man.”

“Powerful enough to subvert the law? How can you trust him then!”

“Because he cares,” Valeria snapped. “He sees a city in agony and he acts. A great man doesn’t hide behind rules and regulations, wringing his hands about the letter of the law while everything around him burns.”

Solamni knew that the Senator’s wife hadn’t meant to indict him personally, but her words stung him as surely as if they’d been intended for him and him alone. For reasons that he couldn’t quite articulate the bounty hunter felt ashamed – ashamed of his trade, ashamed of the man he had become, ashamed of the city that paid him to destroy lives. His face red, he asked the stately patrician: “So what do you need with me then?”

“Rosario is resourceful, but even he won’t be able to pin anything credible to Father Rondolo. We need you to convince him that the game is over.”

“What makes you think I’d do such a thing?”

“You have a bond with the priest. I’ve seen how the two of you are together.”

Solamni gritted his teeth. “We served together.”

“Come again?”

“The 523rd Regiment. We fought in Deltaine.”

“Marines,” Valeria whispered fervently. “Of course. All of his dealers were ex-Marines.”

“Joker’s private army.”

“’Joker’?”

“That was what we called him back then – Father Rondolo. He was our chaplain. Those boys, they’d follow him anywhere.”

“Do you know how many of those boys he’s sent to their graves?”

Solamni still couldn’t quite believe this, no matter how much evidence Valeria revealed. “I still don’t understand why you think I can make him stop! I’m nothing. Just a stupid bounty hunter."

“Will you at least try?”

“I’ll think about it.”

“We can pay you.”

Now it was Solamni who snapped. “This isn’t about the money! You are asking me to betray someone I shed blood with.”

“You didn’t have a problem with bringing in Tiberio.”

“I didn’t know.” Joker, why didn’t you tell me? Solamni thought. Why didn’t you trust me?

The Senator’s wife fixed the bounty hunter with an imperious stare, her blue eyes icy as an Aeedian glacier. “Well now you do know, Signeur Solamni. And now you must decide. Help us rid Hightown of your friend peaceably, or we will do so by whatever means are at our disposal.”

“You’d kill a priest?”

“To save the City, yes.”

“I have to think about this,” Solamni said, feeling the energy ebb away from his frame. He wanted to keep fighting this overly confident woman and her seemingly infallible logic until he found the weakness and collapsed her case against Rondolo, but the way seemed impossibly hard.

Valeria nodded. “You have a day, then my benefactor and I will do what we have to.”

“Grazie,” Solamni croaked, and turned to leave.

“She needs you, Signeur Solamni.”

“What?” the bounty hunter whirled back to face the patrician. “What did you say?”

“Your city. She needs you.”

Solamni stared beyond the woman in front of him, dimly recollecting the last time those words were spoken to him. He shook his head as if to dislodge the fragment of memory, but to no avail. Returning his focus to Valeria, he narrowed his eyes.

“You’ll have my answer by tomorrow morning.” This time the patrician allowed Solamni to leave in silence, albeit a hopeful one.

The bounty hunter was tired. Often Solamni would push himself in this manner while on a job, his nights and days mingling into an adrenaline and alcohol-fueled blur that had a nasty tendency to end in him discovering all of a sudden that his body would tolerate no further abuse, at which point he had no alternative but to give nature its due.

When he returned to his basement apartment that evening he saw that someone had tacked a note to his door. Curious, Solamni made sure he was alone before tugging the papyrus sheaf free and unfolding it to reveal its contents. It was a message from Seraglio – his agent wanted to see him urgently. The bounty hunter puzzled over the address, which was not at the Wolves’ Market but an unfamiliar set of intersecting canals at the edge of the Old Quarter.

Solamni groaned. As much as he wanted to surrender to sleep, he vaguely remembered promising the broker a favor, and since he did not relish the idea of incurring the wrath of the only person in this City capable of finding him steady employment he hopped the nearest cross-town ferry in the direction of the rendezvous.

The boat was bustling with the typical assortment of Canalsiders for this time of day – there were merchants and financiers heading home after a long day on the trading floors, ruffled but still resplendent in their stylish professional couture, riding elbow to elbow with parochial craftsmen, Salumar vendors, and old Shan-li women wrangling mysterious sacks bulging with still-living creatures destined for the family wok later that night.

Solamni hung onto one of the outermost rails and listened to a throng of kids next to him plot the evening’s mischief, oblivious to any prying ears. He smiled despite himself at the fearlessness of youth, paid his fare, and caught a connecting ferry when he reached the feeder canal mentioned in Seraglio’s note. This smaller passenger boat was not as crowded as the first, and as it wended its way away from the lively piazzas of the City’s financial center it dropped off most of those remaining at nearby stops.

When it was just himself, the ferryman and his punters, and a sleeping drunk whom at this point Solamni envied more than pitied the boat took on three fares – they were Varonian in appearance, with each of them built more solidly than the last and all of them with their dead eyes fixed on Solamni, who sat as far away from the boat’s gangway as possible.

The bounty hunter cursed himself for his stupidity. He wondered if Seraglio was a part of this conspiracy, or whether he was already floating dead in a canal somewhere for his part in all of this. Whatever the case, he was nowhere to be found at the empty intersection that the note had identified, so Solamni opted to remain on the ferry where at the very least there would be witnesses. No sooner had the boat resumed its crawl through the marginal canals – whose banks were piled high with darkened Old Varonian tenements, their workaday Canalsider inhabitants already retired for another evening – than the three toughs advanced as a unit towards their quarry.

Solamni considered jumping off the ferry to get away, but with his chainmail shirt and other gear peculiar to his trade he’d more like than not sink like a stone into the murky depths should he miss the quay. So he tried the second least path of resistance and raised his voice:

“Good evening, friends! What brings you out on a glorious night like this-- a little sightseeing, perhaps?”

This at least elicited a chuckle from the trio, which is more than what Solamni had expected, but it did not halt their progress. If he allowed them to come any closer, his crossbow would be as good as useless, and he did not fancy his chances of holding his own in a three-on-one fistfight, no matter how many dirty tricks the bounty hunter had at his disposal.

With a sigh, Solamni drew his weapon and trained it on the third man, by far the most threatening of his attackers. The beefy Canalsider stared at the crossbow with the last expression that Solamni would have expected: curiosity.

“That’s a Fibonacci, isn’t it?”

Deccio Solamni blinked. “What?”

“Your bow. It’s a Fibonacci Series M, I can tell from the stock.”

The bounty hunter nodded dumbly as the third man smiled broadly. “I haven’t seen one of those since the war!"

“Which war?” Solamni asked, already knowing the answer.

“Deltaine, of course. Did you serve?”

“I mustered out with this crossbow,” Solamni said with sudden defensiveness.

“It’s a beauty.” Although the third man spoke with honest appreciation, Solamni couldn’t help but notice that he was still in a decidedly aggressive position. Was this an attempt to psyche him out?

“Grazie. Now before I shoot you with it, will you please tell me why you and your friends are on this boat tonight?”

The third man laughed in a manner that made him seem all the more dangerous. “Our employer would like to have a word with you, that’s all.”

“Your employer? You mean Joker!”

For some reason this caused all of three of them to guffaw. The third man stared at Solamni. “No. Not Joker.”

The bounty hunter’s mind whirled. “Then who?”

“Lower your weapon and I’ll tell you. I give you my word as a fellow Marine.”

A fellow Marine, Solamni thought. As the finger on the trigger of his crossbow began to loosen, his weary brain flashed with sudden insight.

“What was the watchword?”

The third man balked. “Como?”

“In Deltaine. What was the watchword for our regiment?”

“I- I-“

A second’s hesitation was all that Solamni was looking for. No Marine would forget such an all-important code that was the difference between life or death on the front lines. As soon as the third man fumbled, Solamni knew that he had never been in Deltaine. He pulled the trigger, and a crossbow bolt thumped into the man’s abdomen, causing him to double over with a sudden cry.

The other two thugs were only momentarily surprised, however, and rushed the bounty hunter before he could reload his weapon. But Solamni was ready – as soon as the first of the two closed the distance he grabbed one of the idle punts that were lashed to the sides of the ferry and swung it in a wide arc that caught the neckless Varonian tough and sent him cartwheeling into the dark canal.

The last of the trio grabbed the pole on the backswing and jerked Solamni powerfully in his direction, bringing his right knee up to the bounty hunter’s unarmored crotch as he did so. Deccio gasped with pain and stood frozen while his only remaining opponent landed two solid meaty fists against his face, each blow seeming to slow the passage of time slower and slower until he was enveloped in a moment of endless agony. Stunned into helplessness, Solamni watched in fascinated horror as the Canalsider drew a long and slender knife whose steel gleamed with the sticky sickliness of poison.

So this is how it ends, he thought to himself, unable even to draw a final breath before the killer raised his blade to strike. The bounty hunter had heard that at times like these one’s life was supposed to flash before one’s eyes, but all Deccio Solamni could see was cold steel and the all-encompassing darkness beyond.

Some life that I made for myself, he almost smiled as he waited for death. This guy is doing me a favor.

But the final blow never came. Halfway through his swing the thug was knocked over by an unseen assailant. Solamni looked in disbelief at the drunk who had been napping on the other side of the boat, suddenly seeming very sober as he towered over the scrum. His shaggy hair and disheveled filthy clothes could not entirely eclipse the man beneath, and as the two toughs lay groaning on the floor the drunk offered a hand to Deccio.

“Kelrig,” he said, smiling broadly. “The watchword was Kelrig.”

Solmani looked at the man in disbelief as he rolled up his sleeve – sure enough, on his left arm were the telltale Varonian numerals. He nodded. Kelrig was a word from Deltaine, a local name for the boogeyman. Adopting Kelrig as the watchword was a bit of a grim humor, because who else were the invading Marines but a living nightmare? Solamni looked the drunken veteran in the eye and saw those awful dreams lurking about within, even as the man beamed through his broken teeth.

“Thank you,” Deccio said.

“I seen worse on these barges,” the drunk seemed to apologize. “Stuff you don’t believe civilized folk are capable of. And those ferrymen, they don’t bat an eye, do they? S’long as they get paid, they keep making the stops. But no one attacks a brother of mine. Capsice?”

Solamni nodded again and looked down at his assailants. The one with the poisoned blade was completely motionless, and when the bounty hunter turned him over he saw that the thug had fallen on his own knife. He shuddered as he thought of what the venom would have done to him had the drunken vet not intervened on his behalf. The man with a crossbow bolt in his gut however was still very much alive, albeit in gurgling pain.

Deccio bent down in front of the hired tough and smiled cruelly. “You’re such an aficionado of crossbows, ‘michi, so you probably know what kind of missile I shot you with. It’s a mancatcher bolt.”

The thug groaned and tried to roll away from the bounty hunter, but Solamni held him on his back with one hand and grasped the protruding crossbow bolt with the other. Just his touch caused the man to scream in agony as the drunk looked on in inebriated fascination and the ferryman continued to ply his route, utterly indifferent to the drama which had unfolded on his boat. As the tough paused to catch his breath Solamni continued:

“The shaft has four spring-loaded barbs that pop out on impact-- great for latching on to a Canalsider’s drag when he’s on the run. You’re not supposed to use these things at close range, for obvious reasons. Now I’m going to tell you what is going to happen: you’re going to tell me everything I want to know and I’ll do my best to get this out of your gut.”

“Go fuck yourself,” the thug spat at the bounty hunter. Solamni looked at the man with a mixture of disappointment and cold fury as he twisted the bolt ever so slightly. The howls that this elicited were almost too much for Solamni to bear, but he knew that everything depended on his would-be assailant believing that he was capable of doing the unthinkable.

“All I want is a name, ‘michi. Or do you want to see how far I can turn this thing before I pull out your intestines like a plate of pasta?”

The thug’s defiance had given way to desperation. “He’ll kill me.”

“I’ll kill you if you don’t talk,” Solamni lied. “But at least if you spill your guts to me you can get a head start out of town.”

“I couldn’t run fast enough if I tried.”

Deccio thought long and hard about this, when suddenly he had an idea.

“Tell me, ‘michi , how are your sea legs?”

---

“Who is Rosario?”

Solamni had trudged all the way back up the steps of Hightown to find the church’s doors exactly as he’d left them – closed and barred. Undeterred, the bounty hunter kept pounding until the priest had no choice but to answer.

Father Rondolo admitted Solamni hastily, as if he were expecting an ambush, then locked the entrance as tightly as it had been before. If such a thing were even possible, Rondolo looked worse than Solamni did, as it was obvious that the priest had not slept so much as a wink since they had met. When the priest simply hung his head in silence at Solamni’s question, the bounty hunter asked again:

“Joker, I need to know.”

Father Rondolo looked up at his old comrade with haunted eyes. “You don’t want to. Trust me.”

“So Tiberio was your dealer then.”

“Of course,” the priest nodded. “I was chaplain to the whole 523rd. When we came back to the City, most of them were broken souls. I put them back together, Decc.”

“With El Mirad.”

“Don’t you try to play holier than thou with me!” Rondolo flared. “Half our regiment was already hooked on that stuff when we got to Deltaine. At least here I could give them the good stuff, and not the stuff cut with pine tar and dogshit they’re dealing out of the docks at Terminalia.”

“But your stuff was too good, wasn’t it?” Solamni asked. “You ended up undercutting the local competition.”

“It wasn’t supposed to be this way,” Father Rondolo explained. “I just wanted to minister to our brothers from Deltaine and help them find their way. Somehow the Gearhouse found out what we were sitting on.”

“That’s how Mario overdosed.”

“Yes,” the priest said, his face crestfallen and defeated. “They were already junkies, Decc. But they weren’t ready for the real thing. I didn’t know what I was doing, you have to believe me. I didn’t understand until it was too late.”

“Too late for them or too late for you?” the bounty hunter pressed. “You could have stopped when Mario died, but you didn’t. Only when Rosario started picking off your dealers did you start to worry.”

Rondolo had nothing to say to this, so Solamni took this as confirmation. “Valeria never knew, did she? She thought that Rosario was helping her rid Hightown of El Mirad once and for all, when in fact he was just restoring the old status quo.”

“The Senator’s wife used to come to pray all the time,” Father Rondolo said softly. “She and I were close friends and confidants, but all of that changed when Mario died. She never forgave me for what happened to him.”

“So between her and Rosario, you were the target of two vendettas – one business, and one personal. Working together the two could destroy your network. Valeria knew the Gearhouse like the back of her hand, and was able to identify all of your dealers for Rosario, who then plucked them out of Hightown using bogus skipped bonds. But they couldn’t get you.”

“Even Rosario wouldn’t dare touch a priest.”

“Especially one that was working for him.”

“What did you say?”

Solamni swallowed hard. “You heard exactly what I said.

"Rosario was no fool. When a competitor swooped into Hightown with a product that was a hundred times more pure than the crap he was peddling he didn’t just want to eliminate it, he wanted to co-opt it. Your source was much more valuable than whatever business Rosario was losing in the Gearhouse, so he made you an offer that you couldn’t refuse, didn’t he?”

Father Rondolo didn’t have to say anything for Solamni to know he had hit the mark. “How did you know?” the priest croaked.

“Call it a hunch. My only question now is: if you’re both playing for the same team, why keep up with the charade?”

Joker laughed. “Because as long as I keep dealing out of Hightown, I’m the villain and Rosario gets to play the hero. Capisce? “

“But what about Tiberio and the other Marines?” Solamni asked.

“Every double Eieronian tide Valeria roots one of them out and Rosario slips another forged bond to the SPQVs,” Rondolo explains. “A small price to pay for maintaining the illusion.”

“A small price to pay?” Solamni felt the bile rise in his throat. “Those are our brothers!”

Joker smiled thinly. “Please, Decc. I felt the same way you did once – I even thought I could save them one soul at a time. But do you want to know the truth? There is no redemption, no hope. By the time these Marines got to me their souls were broken beyond repair, and the El Mirad devoured whatever was left. You can see it in their eyes. They are the walking dead. At least Rosario and I have given them some meaning and purpose.”

“Before you sacrifice them for a profit!”

Father Rondolo sneered. “I didn’t think you’d understand.”

“Then why tell me any of this?” Solamni asked, although he knew well the answer he’d get – as if on cue, he sensed the presence of others in the seemingly empty church and whirled to see half a dozen men closing on him from opposite directions. Some of them looked familiar, others just looked murderous.

“I’m sorry it has to go this way, Decc. But you know too much.”

Deccio Solamni laughed as the men bore down on him.

“What’s so funny?” Joker asked.

“There’s a ship whose captain I know. She’s a privateer, and she put out from the City… oh, about an hour ago. On this ship is a man named Sforza. Real nice guy, once you get to know him.”

Just as the men were about to lay hands on the bounty hunter Father Rondolo shouted. “Wait!"

And Deccio Solamni smiled and continued:

“Turns out Signeur Sforza knows an awful lot about what you and Rosario have been doing up here on the Rock, and after a little gentle persuasion he was willing to accept an offer I made him.”

“What kind of offer?” Joker asked, his complexion as pale as it was when Solamni first mentioned the name Rosario in his presence.

“The next time this ship puts into port, if Sforza doesn’t get a coded message from me telling him I’m alive, he’s to go with the captain to the SPQVs with what he knows. Sforza might be a lowlife with little or no credibility, but my captain is well-respected at the Palace. Priest or no priest, they’ll be mopping your guts out of this cathedral with a sea sponge.”

For a long time there was silence. Solamni could see his old friend collapsing from within, could see the uncertainty and fear in the eyes of the toughs who were a heartbeat away from ripping him limb from limb. The bounty hunter knew that if he showed so much as the slightest trace of weakness, it would be over for him. He stood and kept his hard slate eyes fixed on Rondolo, waiting for opening that he hoped would present itself. Finally the priest spoke:

“All right. What do you want?”

Solamni sighed imperceptibly, lest the détente be shattered. “I want to walk out this cathedral.”

“That’s it?” Joker was incredulous.

Solamni responded viciously, raising his voice with anger such that it boomed throughout the vacant church and made the half dozen goons take a step back in stunned reaction.

“What, did you think I’d want a wad of bills? A stash of my own? No. I may be a bastard, but I want nothing to do with this blood money.”

He produced the roll of denars that he had been paid for Tiberio and hurled it towards the marble altar, the individual bank notes scattering in every which direction.

“I leave and never see any of your again, that’s all I want.”

Joker closed his eyes. “Fine.” The priest made a quick gesture and the hired muscle withdrew again to the shadows of the cathedral. “But set a foot in Hightown again and all bets are off, capisce?”

Solamni didn’t dignify the threat with an answer. Giving his potential assailants a wide berth, the bounty hunter turned to leave. Over his shoulder, he said: “You know she’ll figure it out, don’t you? It’s just a matter of time.”

“By then I’ll be long gone, old friend. There’s a monastery in Deltaine with a vacancy, so I hear. San Sebastiano. The monks there are famous for their wine.”

“You know, Joker, it’s times like this I wish there really was a One True God.”

“Arrivaderci, ‘michi.”

Solamni left the church in silence, the heavy oak doors slamming behind him. He could see her in the shadows just at the edge of the piazza, waiting for him. The bounty hunter sighed and trudged away from her hiding place and towards the long stairway back down Canalside. Valeria Sulpicia intercepted him, however, and did her best to block his way.

“Well?” she demanded.

“Sorry,” Deccio muttered, unwilling to look at her veiled eyes. “I did all I could.”

The senator’s wife cursed. “That’s it?”

“For me, yes.”

“I can’t believe you’re just going to walk away.”

“This isn’t my fight, lady.”

“You really don’t care about anyone other than yourself, do you?”

Solamni paused, and briefly considered telling the patrician everything he knew. He knew however that she’d never believe him, and that even if she did entertain the possibility that he was telling the truth about Rondolo and Rosario that she would almost certainly die for her credulousness. So the bounty hunter did what he did best-- he swallowed his pride and lied through his teeth.

“I suppose not.”

Valeria Sulpicia lifted her veil just high enough that she could spit at Solamni’s feet. “I hope you rot in Hell.”

Deccio said nothing to this, but merely pushed past the Senator’s wife. He wanted to get away from this place, away from Hightown, the Gearhouse, and that accursed church. Valeria Sulpicia made a half-hearted attempt to grab his overcoat, but he shook her free and began his descent from the nastiness here atop the Rock.

“I’ll kill him myself!” the patrician cried out.

Well out of earshot, Solamni whispered: “I hope you do.”

At the bottom of the staircase there were several gondoliers waiting for a fare. Deccio Solamni picked the one who looked the least sociable and clambered into the passenger seat.

“Where to, signeur?”

The bounty hunter thought for a moment. There was nothing for him back in the Old Quarter. “Anywhere but here,” he said.

“Bene,” the gondolier intoned, pushing away from the granite quay and into the dark waters of the canal. “It’s a lovely night to see where the tides take you, eh, Signeur…?”

“Kelrig. The name is Kelrig.”

Chapter Four: Lacquer

2010-03-14T18:19:00.000-07:00

“Row!”

Ever since he was a boy, Julio dreamed of speed. His father, a fisherman by trade, had captained the winning vessel in the Fiesta della Madre race for eleven consecutive years, with all but one of them with his young son on the victorious boat’s prow. How Julio had loved racing down the Grand Canal and back up again, feeling the rush of the outgoing tide down to Terminalia and the spray of salt on one’s face as the rowers turned around and battled their way back up to the Great Seawall of the Old Quarter. In all of the Three Continents, was there anything better?

The young boy marveled as the cityscape whipped by and the seine boat weaved through the succession of stone bridges that spanned the canal – when running with the tide, there was little margin for error in a deep-hulled vessel meant for the open waters, but Julio’s father navigated the course with expertise and grace as if he had lived his entire life in preparation for this race. And in a sense, he had. For while he had made his living dragging a net through the fishing grounds of the Ryzien Shoals, he too had dreamed of speed, ever since he was a boy.

Although his father had passed away shortly after Julio’s tenth birthday, the boy would never forget the thrill of the race and the sweetness of victory, even if he had grown up to be a gondolier plying the sleepiest parish in all of the City. Out of respect for their beloved captain, the crew of the fishing vessel offered to take Julio on, but the child’s mother refused and spirited him away to the care of her three brothers and their gondola business.

Jealous of their departed brother-in-law’s prowess at the helm, Julio’s uncles refused to let him take out any of their boats, but instead tasked him with the thankless tasks of maintaining the fleet. For seven long years he mended hulls, joined seams, and detailed the prows before he had saved enough money to buy some lacquer of his own. It was a fine model of gondola that had clearly seen better days, but it did not take Julio long to restore it to its former glory, and soon he had the classiest boat in the family business, much to the chagrin of his uncles, as well as the fastest.

Here, however, the clientele cared less for speed than they did not to be jostled or splashed, and while Julio was no less an expert at handling his boat in this manner he dreamed of a patron who would leap into the cab and tell him to row as if his life depended on it, spilled Salumar coffee be damned. But alas, such customers were nowhere to be found in Marilia - until tonight.

There she was - a girl of not more than twenty years, with dark locks and the sun-kissed olive complexion of a person from the Varony, but dressed in the finest of Hightown couture and adorned with a least a thousand denars’ worth of jewelry. After a dull day’s work that was equally lackluster in profits, Julio was about to call it an early evening, but no sooner had he started to tie up his boat to the quay than this pretty young thing appeared in the passenger’s seat.

“Are you hard of hearing? Go, go, go!”

Julio stood dumbstruck for a moment, and briefly contemplated telling the girl to get the hell out of his boat. Then he heard the sound of many heavy footfalls and an angry shout: “There she is!”

The gondolier looked at his unexpected passenger – was that fear he saw in her eyes, or was it something else? As the shouts drew nearer, Julio realized he had to make a decision. He kicked the bowline into the dark water and pushed away from the granite landing as the first of those giving chase came into view, a hulking goon of indeterminate ethnicity the sort of which only came to a parish like Marilia by accident, followed by a couple of Omulian thugs, one of whom was brandishing a hand-crossbow.

“Madon’!”

Julio shouted a quick prayer to the Sea Mother and rowed the gondola hard to port, causing it to drift suddenly across the dark canal just as the thug loosed a bolt – it missed his head by mere inches. Sensing that he only had a split second before the next shot, the boatman surged forward, finding the swiftest water in the channel.

It was an outgoing tide, and Eieron had made his baleful appearance in the night sky, the rogue moon doubling the pull of steady and predictable Diala. Mindful of his customers’ delicate sensibilities, Julio would studiously avoid the Eieronian tides (another reason to call it an early night tonight), but this evening the chaotic riptide was his salvation. Although he was certainly that the had Omulian shot again, Julio dared not look back, concentrating instead on navigating the treacherous course of Marilia’s side canals in the dark at a pace he only half-remembered in his dreams.

“Look out!”

The girl gestured towards the stone bridge ahead in a panic. Julio was about to chide her for thinking he couldn’t slip between the massive pilings without wrecking when he saw himself what she had been looking at: several more thugs on the bridge! The boatman cursed as two of them leapt from overhead, then shouted to the girl: “Hold on!”

Julio’s paddle was a curious combination of paddle and punt. In untrained hands, it was long, ungainly, and practically useless, but a skilled gondolier was able to use this instrument to start and stop suddenly. It was the latter effect that Julio wanted this time, and as he drove the punt into the muck of the canal’s bottom with all of his strength his boat stopped in midstream as if by magic, causing the two Omulians to plunge into open water a few yards ahead.

The abrupt halt also sent the gondolier’s unexpected passenger sliding off her cushion and onto the floor of the boat, cursing as she did so. Julio couldn’t help but laugh as he guided the boat under the bridge: “I told you to hold on!”

“Funny,” the pretty girl. “Do your fares pay you to tell jokes or not to tell them?”

The boatman tried to think of a witty remark, but his wit was cut short by the appearance of a black hooded gondola off their starboard bow. Julio was a Canalsider born and bred, and knew instinctively what this curious watercraft was even though up until now he’d never had the exceedingly bad fortune to see one up close.

Death’s Handmaiden, they called them. The gondola itself was a sleek model of lacquer, something built for a quick getaway, atop which was mounted a private compartment with heavy curtains. As the dark cloak was pulled aside, the gondolier found himself face to face with a repeating crossbow, one of the Varonian war machine’s most fearsome weapons. The size of an ox-cart, the siege engine was operated by turning a crank, which caused the oversized bow to churn out a stream of deadly missiles that were fed from a magazine above.

“Shit! Get down!”

The first missile slammed into the raised bow of the gondola, cracking lacquer and splintering wood; the second sailed over his passenger’s head just as she ducked and into the darkness. Julio tried to jerk the vessel away from the hooded menace, but the third bolt found its mark, sinking into his leg.

Staggered, he howled in pain, almost dropping his punt and falling headlong into the dark canal, his vision clouded with a bright red mist. Once while fishing with his father Julio had run through his hand with a big rusty hook – the pain had been the most excruciating of his entire life, but it paled in comparison to this. The gondolier struggled to remain conscious as he felt dark red blood run down his thigh.

Fortunately the boat had been moving so quickly on the Eieronian rip that the next few rounds from Death’s Handmaiden missed the target entirely, but the marksman wouldn’t take long to compensate for their speed and finish them off. Fighting both his pain and an ever-growing sense of panic, Julio furiously tried to think of a plan, when suddenly it came to him.

He poled the gondola into a side alley, where their passage was all but blocked by a massive barge piled high with garbage. Two masked Southlanders were scouring the quays for the parish’s refuse, as they did every night, and as the small watercraft slipped quickly down the canal in their direction they gesticulated wildly for them to stop.

“What are you doing?” the girl shouted, but Julio didn’t answer. All he could think of right now was that repeating crossbow and how its operator now had a clear shot at the back of his head. He pushed the boat forward, as if the garbage barge were not blocking their way, and the girl closed her eyes, preparing for a painful and foul-smelling collision.

When a heartbeat later the gondola had not come to a crashing halt, she opened her eyes again to see that the Southlanders had shifted their scow ever so slightly to the left, allowing the narrow gondola to just slip through. As she craned her neck around to look behind them she saw that the hooded craft was stuck behind the barge, slightly too wide to follow. Her gondolier gave a triumphant grimace.

“Verdi makes nice lacquer, but the hull on the new models is too damned wide for getting around the back canals. Lucky for us, no?”

The girl smiled back, then grimaced as well as she saw the wound in his thigh. “You’re hurt!”

“Really?” Julio tried to deadpan. “I hadn’t noticed.”

The girl drew close to the gondolier, reaching out gently to touch the crossbow bolt. Julio did his best not to react, but groaned with pain nonetheless.

“Sorry.”

Julio looked over his shoulder warily at their wake and the dark gloom beyond. “I think we lost your friends.”

“They were most certainly not my friends,” the girl huffed.

“Who were they, then?” Julio surveyed his passenger with an appraising eye as she tenderly examined his wound, trying but mostly failing to resist the urge to stare at her bosom as she did so. “Your pimp? Or perhaps a disgruntled john.”

The girl stiffened suddenly and drew away, wrapping her exposed chest under a fold of her shawl. “So I’m a whore then.”

Julio, sensing his mistake, began to sputter an apology, but the girl simply laughed. “What are you supposed to think - a woman like me, dressed like this, running from a bunch of neckless muscle? I’m surprised you didn’t just tell me to get out of your boat.”

“I considered it.” Julio tried not to smile, relieved that he had not mortally offended his fare.

The girl’s dark eyes flashed. “What a gentleman you are!”

Julio steered the gondola down another narrow alley, hoping that his zig-zagging route through Marilia’s neighborhood canals would confound even the most dogged pursuit. “So who are you then?”

The girl smiled broadly. “I’m an entertainer.”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“I sing. On a stage. With a band and everything?”

Julio stopped in mid-stroke, suddenly remembering why his passenger looked so familiar. “At Sabatini’s!”

“You’ve seen me there.”

“Yes.” He recalled the performance quite vividly now. It was maybe a year ago, and in a rare moment of largesse his uncles had taken him out for his Name Day, on the feast of Saint Julio.

Sabatini’s was the poshest Canalside joint he’d ever been to, and he remembered feeling quite of out of place in his old cloak and threadbare tunic - the rest of the men were decked out in Ferrari drag and crisp velvet and the women in the latest offerings from the Fashion Tyrannies, those blessed islands south of the Great Locks where the designers lived like kings and it was a crime to dress slovenly.

Julio hid in his cups until the night’s entertainment began and she took the stage. Even after all this time he remembered his sense of surprise that such a big and vibrant voice had emerged from the mouth of someone so slight. But there was something else, as well: a sadness that seemed many years out of place but which nevertheless colored everything the girl sang. At the time the young gondolier assumed that it was the expensive wine that made her more beautiful up on that stage than she actually was, but now that she was sitting a heartbeat away he realized that he’d been mistaken.

“Then you know how to get there?”

Julio nodded.

“Good,” the girl smiled. “I’m running late for rehearsal.”

He couldn’t help but laugh at this, and she laughed as well.

“My name’s Evangelina, by the way.”

“I remember,” the gondolier smiled. “I’m Julio.”

“Piacere, Julio. E grazie.”

---

Sabatini’s was exactly as Julio remembered it – an outpost of opulence on Marilia’s modest and unassuming shores. Once an ancient villa situated on a patch of bedrock, the modern establishment had simply hollowed out what had gone before and replaced it with innards more suitable to idle pleasure-seeking than staid domesticity. The first floor had been given over entirely to a stage and dance hall, whereas those levels above were retrofitted with gaming tables and courtesans’ parlors.

Atop it all, Francesco Sabatini lived in a penthouse apartment whose splendor the gondolier had until this evening only could have imagined. But no sooner had Julio arrived with his passenger than the two of them had been whisked upstairs by attentive servants under the watchful eye of a broad and muscular Eastern Salumar majordomo. There in a clean tiled room with running hot and cold water Julio had his wound treated by a man who seemed too coarse and gruff to be a surgeon.

“I’m a butcher by day,” he admitted as he examined the bolt protruding from his thigh. Evangelina stayed by Julio’s side while the part-time doctor poked and grunted his way to a diagnosis (“Well, let me tell you this: you’re a very lucky man, signeur. The shaft just missed your artery by the thickness of a cyp – a little to the left and you would have bled to death right there on the spot. Now let me find my bone saw and I’ll have you fixed up in no time at all.”).

Just as the surgeon finished extracting the dart and bandaging Julio’s wound the door to the room opened and a young man walked in, flanked by two expressionless but muscular bodyguards. The man was immaculately dressed in black velvet, with a single silver chain around his neck for adornment, and his dark shoulder-length hair was slicked back in the modern style. He reached out to the gondolier with soft hands that were free of both rings and any sign of manual labor and smiled broadly:

“Piacere. I am Francesco Sabatini.”

Julio grasped Sabatini’s hands and mumbled a greeting, uncertain of how to address such a person. He of course knew of Mister Sabatini and his exploits, as well as what happened to the people who crossed him or got in his way, but never in a million years had he considered the possibility of ever meeting him face to face. Briefly the gondolier met the young man’s gaze, only to be overwhelmed by its icy, hungry intensity.

“I understand that you came to the rescue of my carissima,” Sabatini continued, moving to put his arms around Evangelina. “You have my gratitude.”

Julio croaked, “It was nothing. Niente.”

“Niente?” Sabatini laughed. “My surgeon pulls a piece of siege ordnance out of your leg and you say it’s nothing! I like a man with a sense of modesty, mind you, but don’t insult me.”

The gondolier could feel the young man’s menace, like a shark cruising the tidal flats. Terrified that he might compound his faux pas, he kept his mouth shut, prompting Evangelina to come to his rescue:

“Che cosa, Francesco? The man’s in shock. He didn’t even get paid, for pity’s sake!”

Sabatini glared at the girl, who met his cold eyes with equal parts fire. He sighed and relented. “Forgive me, signeur. Of course I am grateful.”

He reached into a fold of his velvet robes and withdrew a clip of paper money, handing it Julio without even a cursory glance at how much he was giving him. The gondolier touched the crisp bank notes and swallowed hard as he recognized hitherto unheard-of denominations of denars and minars.

“We take care of our friends, capisce?”

Julio nodded dumbly, suddenly a very rich gondolier.

“My carissima, she could use a personal driver.”

Sabatini’s tone made it clear that he was not asking Julio a question.

---

The gondolier celebrated his newfound wealth at his employer’s club, ordering a couple of bottles of expensive Salumar brandy and tipping the waitstaff generously. Since he was expected to take Evangelina back home after her show, Julio didn’t imbibe much himself but was content to share the fine drink with some impromptu friends and reflect on the night’s events as the band milled about the stage and tuned their instruments.

It occurred to him that he could probably still give Sabatini his money back and walk away from this, but he found that he didn’t want to. It wasn’t just the girl, who was of course beautiful, but the chase had kindled something deep within his soul. The thrill of running an Eieronian tide with his very life on the line was almost payment enough for this new job he had stumbled into, though the thick wad of cash wasn’t bad either. But as he sipped his brandy and watched Evangelina take the stage to sing, Julio wondered how this business arrangement – attractive as it was at this moment to him, buzzed on expensive liquor and the night’s excitement – could possibly end well.

“You’re quiet,” Evangelina observed to her gondolier as he ferried her back to her apartment. The boat glided through the dark waters effortlessly, as Julio did his best not to grunt with pain as every stroke aggravated the raw wound in his thigh. The butcher had done an impressive job with his injury, but then again he’d probably extracted hundreds of crossbow bolts in his service to a fellow such as Sabatini.

“It’s been a long night, signeura.”

“Please call me Evangelina.”

The gondolier paused. “As you wish, Evangelina.”

There was a long and awkward silence, punctuated only by the sound of Julio’s oar splashing. Evangelina absently ran her fingers along the lacquered exterior of the gondola, only to gasp when she touched cold iron: “Your boat!”

Julio nodded grimly. “There’s another one in the back here as well.”

“Can you fix it?” Evangelina almost winced as she asked.

“Of course. You should have seen what this thing looked like when I bought it!”

“A ’21 Magliozzi? You’re kidding.”

The gondolier perked up at his fare’s knowledge of fine watercraft. “Nope, I swear. I found her in a junkpile just off the Gazza Strip. The hull had a massive crack and the paint was completely peeled. Took me the better part of a year to restore her.”

“Impressive.” The girl touched the boat again, only this time in a manner that was more deliberate and more sensuous. Julio watched her painted nails move across the black lacquer, imagining what how they would feel tracing across his own skin. Then he thought of Sabatini, neckless goons, and a one-way trip to the bottom of the Bay of Skulls, and tried to change the subject:

“So how long have you been singing?”

Evangelina smiled. “Forever. My mother would swear that when she sang to me in the womb, that she could hear me accompanying her in harmony. I grew up in the Varony, but when I was six my family moved to E-Ra.”

Julio stopped paddling in mid-stroke. Egrezi Ra was one of the most ancient and wicked cities on the Three Continents, a place where mythical beasts were only too real and the dead walked among the living – or so he had heard. At any rate, it was hardly an ideal place for a young child. Evangelina laughed at this dramatic pause on her chauffeur’s part:

“Oh, relax! It was much less terrifying than you’d imagine. I spent most of my time in music class. My father was a fairly successful carpenter and had been hired by one of the opera companies in E-Ra as their new set designer. Part of his payment was free voice lessons for his talented daughter. So I grew up as an understudy to some of the best singers in the Basin – I even got to sing for one of the Gorgon Queens!”

“Really?”

Evangelina beamed, clearly proud of this achievement. “Cariebasa had come to E-Ra to attend the premiere of Il Ciocoloterio, and as luck would have it the lead female soprano had come down with a bout of laryngitis. So it was me who took the stage that night. I got three curtain calls! After the show, the Queen met with the cast and gave us gifts – I still wear mine to this day.”

Julio looked at her outstretched left hand, where a serpentine bangle of white gold twined itself around her wrist. The workmanship was so fine that the scales of the sculpted snake almost seemed to shimmer and even breathe. The gondolier was so distracted by this strange pulsating piece of adornment that he almost collided with a Shan-li dhow carrying fresh produce to one of the City’s many early-morning markets. Evangelina laughed as Julio changed course at the last second and the squat Southlander skipper cursed at them.

“I heard that the man who wrote that opera became the Queen’s vizier! Can you believe that? So that was my brush with greatness. Not too long after that the opera company folded and we had to go back to the Varony, which was hell on earth to a girl who had grown up with a city like E-Ra to entertain her. So I skipped out as soon as I could – I figured that I could make a living in the City here on my pipes, which was easier said than done. Pride kept me from going back home, though, even when things got pretty rough.”

Now it was Evangelina who paused dramatically, and Julio could only speculate as to what she had gone through. There were a couple of brothels in Marilia, and many an evening the gondolier had ferried young working ladies to and from their appointments with gentlemen callers, some of whom were only gentle men in name.

How awkward and painful it was to paddle in silence while his fare hugged herself and wept, or nursed a black eye or split lip with the glazed mien of a shellshocked marine. Julio acknowledged her unspoken trauma by lowering his gaze sympathetically; Evangelina lowered her eyes as well, watching the cold phosphorescent burn of Canalside fungus lamps reflected in the waters of the canal.

“Sabatini saved me from that life,” she continued. “He found me when I was pretty low and took care of me. Gave me my own apartment, a regular gig at his club – one that paid, no less. And for this he asked for nothing.”

“Except your companionship?”

Evangelina bristled at this question. “That’s my choice, not his. He never forced me to do anything!”

Julio found himself apologizing again, the second time this evening. “Disculpa me. It’s not my place to judge.”

“We’re just talking,” she teased him. “Don’t you ever disagree with anyone?”

The gondolier smirked. “It’s bad for business.”

Evangelina couldn’t help but laugh at this. “I suppose you have a point there. So what about you, Jules - how did you end up pushing lacquer for a living?”

Jules. He liked the sound of that. And Julio couldn’t remember the last time a fare had ever asked him a personal question. To his passengers he was simply what he was – a means of conveyance, good for some mindless patter to take their minds off traffic and perhaps a tip as to the best place to grab a bite to eat in the neighborhood and what canals to avoid. But this girl was different. She actually seemed to care.

“Ah, it’s a long story.”

“So?” Evangelina’s eyes sparkled. “Take the long way home and tell me.”

---

Julio was unaccustomed to thinking of his life as a story, so it came out in long and slow circles, like the looping route he picked through the still-sleepy parochial canals. Evangelina however listened patiently to his tale, asking interesting questions when he faltered and expressing more than a token amount of joy at his triumphs and surprise or sympathy at any sudden reversals of fate. When at long last Julio had finished, the girl closed her eyes and svmiled.

“I like the idea of you as a boy on the prow of your father’s boat, racing down the Grand Canal.”

The gondolier said nothing, but smiled as well.

“You miss him, don’t you?”

“I don’t think a day goes by that I’m not thinking about him,” Julio admitted.

“How did he die?”

Even though Julio felt completely at ease with this beautiful stranger, he shook his head nevertheless. Now it was Evangelina’s turn to backtrack.

“I shouldn’t have asked you that.”

Rather than acknowledge the apology, the gondolier responded with an intrusive question of his own:

“Why were they chasing you tonight?”

Evangelina paused for a moment, then sighed. “Fair enough. Let’s just say that if you’re a friend of Sabatini, you’re someone else’s enemy – whether you like it or not.”

Julio grunted. “I suppose that goes for me as well?”

“I’m afraid so.”

The gondolier laughed at this. “Well, I did always want a life of adventure. As long as I don’t get shot at every night.”

Evangelina grinned wickedly. “Every other night at most - I promise.”

They arrived at her tenement just as the night was giving way to the dawn, the inky black canals taking on a dull gray metallic hue as the sun failed to break through the clouds but illuminated the morning gloom nonetheless. Julio barely had time to tie up his boat before his passenger had disembarked; from the granite quay she gave him a tired smile.

“See you tomorrow night?”

“As you wish, signeura.”

---

That night Julio dreamed of his father. It was the Fiesta della Madre, and once again he was seated at the front of their seine boat, a child in body but his fully aware adult self on the inside. The racing ship was never so splendid, with its freshly-painted hull cutting an impressive swatch of bright yellow above the waterline and deep red below. Someone had added a pair of eyes to the prow, as well as a row of shark’s teeth, having rendered both in such a lifelike fashion that the vessel seemed poised to devour its competition in the race.

The boy looked back at his father’s crew, a team of ten rowers sitting in five pairs. As Julio scanned their faces he realized that they were all in fact his father – ten perfect copies of him, laboring over their oars, while the eleventh sat at the rear of the ship and smiled at his son. “Isn’t it a beautiful day for a race?”

Julio opened his mouth to say something, but then he noticed something strange about the sky. Although it was daytime, the heavens were black, save for the moons on the horizon: he could make out the orbs of Diala – stately and predictable – as well as Eieron the trickster moon, but much to his astonishment there were several others hanging over their heads as well, of different hues and sizes. No sooner had Julio noticed these extra celestial bodies than he felt the seine boat pick up speed as it ran its course.

“Dad,” he tried to call out. “There’s something wrong!”

But none of his father’s images seemed to hear over the din of their own efforts and a racing song that sounded more like one of Evangelina’s mournful dirges. Julio gripped the prow of the ship as tightly as he could as more moons materialized in the dark sky and they surged ahead faster and faster.

His heart racing, Julio could barely hang on now when he saw that the seine boat was rapidly approaching a massive stone bridge. But that was impossible! There were no bridges that spanned the breadth of the Grand Canal downstream of the Bridge of Eleven Pillars connecting Marilia to Stabientia, and yet here it was -- a towering wall of stone that the boy realized to his horror did not have any arches to permit their passage.

“We have to slow down!”

As the boat hurtled towards certain doom, Julio could make out a row of figures atop the wall – a motley assemblage of Omulians and Cebalese waving their steel as if they were cheering them on before the gondolier realized that two vessels had pulled alongside the racing vessel’s port and starboard sides. Each was a hooded gondola propelled by an unseen force, twin Handmaidens that suddenly rained volley after volley of missiles into the crew. But even as the rowers yelled and fell overboard as they were shot, the seine boat continued to pick up speed, until it was just Julio and his father and the looming wall, which now reached up to the moon-filled sky.

“Dad!”

But Julio’s father said nothing. His face was one of joyful determination – old Puglio was well on his way to another victory. As the prow of the ship slammed into the bridge, the boy was thrown forward into the wall of stone, but instead crashing violently into it he passed right through, flying even faster than before. Julio desperately looked back for some sign of his father or the boat, but he could see neither. Even the impossibly-tall bridge had disappeared, as had the distant banks of the Grand Canal. Now it was just the gondolier, racing across an endless stretch of open water, forever and ever…

Julio woke up in a cold sweat. It was midmorning, and his fitful attempts at sleep had resulted in a series of ever-more vivid nightmares, so rather than tempt fate by rolling over and closing his eyes again he decided to hit the canals and make some honest money.

He splashed his face with some brackish water from his washbasin and changed to his other nice tunic, making a mental note to stop off at one of the emporia and spend the wad of bank notes that Sabatini had given him on some decent clothing. Despite the fact that he had obviously been a guest of the proprietor last night, he could feel all of those hundreds eyes on him nevertheless, judging him and his threadbare working-class couture. And while normally he wouldn’t be bothered with such superficial considerations, he thought of Evangelina in her simple elegance and found himself wanting to look worthy of her company – a silly thought, but there it was.

After a night of slaloming along an Eieronian tide while being chased by nameless goons, Julio’s daytime fares seemed even more humdrum than before. There was the ancient widow who never tipped, the cittadini who dared not mingle with his electorate on his way to and from his parochial offices, the sad-eyed prostitute on her way home from a morning appointment. On most days Julio would do his best to make conversation with all of these people and maybe even get the working girl to crack a smile with his lame attempts at humor, but today he found himself too distracted for banter.

“Watch where you’re going!” the miserly crone yelled at him as he almost drifted into a delivery scow.

“Sorry, signeura.”

The old lady sniffed. “You just can’t find a decent gondolier anymore these days. Why, when I was your age your kind was more interested in good service. Now it’s all about how many cyps you have in your pockets at the end of the day, isn’t it?”

“Eh?”

“I mean, for the love of Saint Sophia, look at the holes in your gondola! It’s a wonder that we haven’t already sunk.”

Julio winced. He had all but forgotten that his beloved Magliozzi had sustained a couple of wounds itself the night before, but by the midmorning light how could he have missed them? Looking at how the military-grade crossbow quarrels had perfectly perforated the hull of his gondola, he marveled that he was in fact still alive after taking such a hit himself. After getting himself a proper set of clothes, Julio resolved to spend the rest of the day patching his lacquer.

The purseful of coin that the gondolier had made by the noontime siesta was not an insignificant morning’s haul for people in his line of work, but still felt light alongside the folded bills in his pocket. After only a few hours’ taste of real wealth, Julio was already beginning to despair its inevitable absence.

When he had taken Sabatini’s money, Julio was so dazzled by the amount of cash that he didn’t think to ask whether he was being paid for the night, the week, or the month. The hazards of being a parasite, he reflected as he moored his boat and made his way on foot to the nearest fine clothier. Wasn’t it better to be paid by the job, where the fares were negotiated in advance and a gratuity was an unexpected windfall?

Julio joined the midafternoon crush of humanity as it occupied every square foot of dry canalside and flowed in directions both parallel and perpendicular to the adjacent waterways. In theory a man could walk from one end of the City to the other, though it would likely take the better part of a day and the best of one’s imagination. This was due to the fact that Varo, an island city, was in fact a series of islands within islands, a living archipelago of ancient parishes and ever rising and falling tenements that was allowed to grow without any guiding authority or master plan.

Parochial concerns therefore usually trumped any sense of unity, and neighborhoods tended not to think of anyone or anything beyond their own stretch of canal. The gondolier was by his very nature at odds with this insular conception of the universe, always looking for the shortcuts and hidden connections, the invisible ties that bound this mishmash of habitation into the metropolis that the rest of the world knew and both loved and feared.

Where Marilia met the Grand Canal was the Bridge of Eleven Pillars, the last span over Varo’s main waterway before it opened downstream into a broad tidal estuary wherein lay a small mountain range of warehouses, the Lowtown slums, and the myriad piers and quays of Terminalia, which extended the City’s reach to every last corner of the Three Continents and beyond.

The bridge was a rare example of Varonian monumental architecture, built over a thousand years ago by stonemasons from Bruuthal -- the granite had been hewn from the rock of Hightown itself, which before it became the aerie of Varo’s elite had served as a quarry for the growing town. Although there were six other bridges crossing the canal further upstream, the central location and sheer size of the Bridge of the Eleven Pillars made it one of the City’s major arteries. Across from Marilia was Stabientia, that outcrop of bedrock where the first Varonians had settled when the Raynar Horde had driven them into the sea all of those millennia ago.

Although the vicissitudes of fortune had not been altogether kind to the City’s original Old Quarter, Stabientia still retained some of its ancient glory. Not only did it serve as a regional administrative center, but its long promenade on the northern bank of the Grand Canal – once the fishing docks of Stabien’s Town – was now home to some of Varo’s largest emporia, where the Great Houses exhibited and sold their wares.

It was here that Julio spent a goodly portion of the previous night’s pay on fine clothing: a new tailored uniform for work and a crushed velvet robe simply because he’d never been able to afford one until now. Rather than the ubiquitous black robes, however, the gondolier opted for a deep crimson hue instead, eliciting the approval of his Eastern Salumar tailor.

“Black, black, black. Everyone wants black velvet these days – even the mathemagicians!”

Purple was the traditional color of Varo’s mathematical savants, those practitioners of the Economic Cabal who maintained the preeminence of the City over the known world through their statistical divination. Julio knew very little of the Cabal or the mathemagicians, except that their powers were feared by all. Nevertheless, the tailor’s lament gave him an idea for how to spend the rest of his bankroll.

---

“Why, Jules – you really shouldn’t have!”

Evangelina stroked the new interior of the ’21 Magliozzi with a loving hand. The purple crushed velvet perfectly complemented the black lacquered exterior, which Julio had just finished patching and buffing in time to pick her up in front of her tenement. The gondolier smiled, pleased that his fare was herself pleased with the changes.

“It’s amazing what you can do with a little bit of money. Really, the tailor was so desperate to unload his inventory of purple velvet that he offered to help with the upholstery.”

“And you already fixed the holes, too!” Evangelina marveled at the lack of evidence as to where the crossbow bolts had penetrated the gondola’s hull.

“Well, she needs another coat of lacquer or two. But it’ll do for now. Remember, you promised we wouldn’t get shot at tonight.”

Evangelina smiled. “A promise is a promise. No crossbows.”

“So where to, then?”

“How do you feel about ice hockey?”

---

That a city whose waterways never freeze should be so exceedingly fond of a game played on slabs of ice was less of a mystery than it sometimes seemed to foreigners. Ice was one of the most precious commodities in the Three Continents, more expensive than gold or other precious metals, so it was only fitting that the Varonians made their national sport a game that squandered such wealth so frivolously.

Although many peoples trafficked in the ice trade, it was the Matriarchy of Tiglarno that captured the lion’s share of business among Canalsiders. As female guards watched with lash in hand, male slaves hewed blocks of frozen water throughout the Tiglarnan piedmont as long as winter held sway, loading the ice onto river barges and selling their cargo to icehouses in the Varony. Here the ice was furiously speculated upon as mathemagicians conjured up their best prestigitations of how hot the upcoming summer months would be, and slab by slab it was auctioned off to the highest bidders – usually the denizens of Hightown, followed by the Great Houses involved in foodstuffs, then the owners of the City’s several dozen hockey arenas.

One of Varo’s oldest such venues was located in Stabientia, home of the storied Blues, whose inability to win a championship was the stuff of legend and song. And yet no other parish had a team that was more beloved and watched, leading many to wonder whether victory would in fact be bad for business for hockey’s most lovable losers and still others to postulate that the Blues’ owners conspired to keep their fans perpetually disappointed and their business booming.

Needless to say, it was a packed venue when Julio and his passenger arrived at the arena. No sooner did the gondola turn off the main canal than it was mired in a sea of watercraft – cittadini and their parasites, well-to-do merchants showing off their prosperity, and a motley assortment of Canalsiders from throughout the Three Parishes neighborhood who were simply treating themselves to a night of spectacle if they could manage to purchase admission from one of the myriad sharks plying their ticket-scalping trade on game nights. The side canal was also choked with the barges of vendors selling food and drink, as well as the paraphernalia associated with hockey fandom: blue tunics, blue noisemakers, absurd-looking blue hats in the style of Voord, from whose snowy peaks the sport of hockey first originated.

At Evangelina’s bidding Julio stopped at a barge selling cockles served raw in a papyrus cup. Julio savored the briny shellfish and peered quizzically at the foreign words scrawled on one side of the cone – the Varonians, not being the greatest lovers of literature, bought books by the ton from the rest of the world and rendered them page by page into scrap paper. Evangelina noticed the gondolier squinting and pulled his arm close so that she could read what he was puzzling over.

“Mmmm,” she said. “Looks like some Cherin love poetry.”

Julio blinked. “You read Cherin?”

“Just a smidge. Let’s see… ‘Open up your eyes, love, and awaken to a world of flower and song.’ Not bad for a free bit of verse with your clams.”

The gondolier chuckled. “What did you get?”

“Oh, nothing.” Evangelina crumpled her paper cup in what seemed to be haste. “Tide charts or something boring like that.”

“Hey! I live and die by those. Let me see – I can tell you if they were any good…”

“No, the ink’s all runny on mine anyway.” She continued to ball up the papyrus then tossed it into the canal. “We should go inside and find our seats.”

Julio wasn’t sure what it was, but Evangelina’s demeanor had him on edge ever since they had made their way over to Stabientia. After crossing the Grand Canal she had barely ventured a word at all, and now her behavior was as puzzling as it was troubling. He briefly considered asking her what was amiss, but already he was resigning himself to knowing only what his employers felt like sharing with him. So instead of confronting Evangelina, Julio simply did what he was asked to, putting himself on full alert as he did so.

The hockey arena was abuzz with anticipation. Row after row of wooden bleachers rose around the frozen oval that was the playing field, and as spectators thundered up and down the stairs looking for the best seats among those not reserved for the rich and powerful a squadron of attendants slid about the rink, filling in cracks and smoothing out any rough patches in the ice that still remained. There were those who maintained that parochial hockey arenas deliberately crafted hazards for visiting teams, but alas, such trickery never seemed to be enough for poor Stabientia’s Blues. And yet the faithful came, in such numbers that no sooner had the venue started seating people than it seemed ready to come tumbling down under the groaning weight of so many fanatical souls.

Sabatini was not the kind of person who settled for the cheap seats, and so when Julio presented his passenger at the gate the two of them were whisked through the crowd to a private box that was roped off with velvet and guarded by what appeared to be a veteran hockey player, a dull and beefy Canalsider with a grin like broken crockery. He recognized Evangelina at once and ushered her into the reserved seating, but squared his shoulders to block the unfamiliar gondolier from entering his employer’s exclusive domain.

“Relax Vittorio,” Evangelina spoke with air of easy authority. “Francesco isn’t coming tonight, so I’ve brought myself a date.”

The hockey crusader turned bouncer looked wary, but let Julio pass, even if he puffed out his broad chest as he did so. The lanky gondolier knew better than to take such bait, but met the bodyguard’s stony gaze nonetheless with defiant eyes. Sensing the tension, Evangelina snapped: “Alright, enough already! If I had wanted to go to a cockfight, I would have. Capisce?”

Chastened, Julio lowered his eyes and Vittorio exhaled somewhat; the songstress smiled. “There now, that’s much better! Save your enthusiasm for the game – I hear the Blues are actually favored to win tonight.”

Indeed they were. The Orangemen of Orsilia had once been a force of nature on the ice, but years of mismanagement and talent poaching by other parishes had taken enough luster off of the former champions that they were vulnerable to a club such as the Blues. The fans of Old Staben’s Town, knowing this, showed up looking for blood, and already they had not been disappointed as a fracas erupted in the cheap seats between locals and a crowd of hooligans from Orsilia who had been foolish enough to make the trip to see their team.

While there was often a zone of safety for visiting fans who traveled in significant numbers, the air was murderous enough among Stabientia’s faithful that brawls were an inevitability between the blue and orange tunics. It took several minutes and the intervention of the Varonian police department to quell the violence, after which the clashing fans were kept apart from each other by a cordon of attendants who probably wished they could be anywhere else that night.

Julio sat next to Evangelina and desperately tried to read her, but to no avail. She seemed to be vacillating without rhyme or reason between genuine interest in the hullabaloo and spectacle of the game and that kind of alert distractedness that is characteristic of a person who is expecting something – or someone.

Sure enough, just as the action of the ice began and the crowd fixed its passions there. Evangelina excused herself and disappeared before the gondolier had a chance to respond or object. Julio wondered if he should follow her, but thought better of it. Not only were the crowds too thick, but he didn’t relish trying to squeeze past a doubtless still angered Vittorio without Evangelina’s mollifying presence. So he sat by himself and tried to engage his attentions in the game.

Fortunately this was not too difficult, as the private box was so close to the ice that he could feel the chill emanating from the arena floor and even smell the sweat, leather, and blood of a hard-fought contest. The Blues had given up a couple of early goals, but were in the midst of a rally. A scrum for the puck at the center of the rink had resulted in a showdown between the Orangemen’s chief attacker and the captain for Stabientia, who had slashed his opponent expertly between the ribs with the sharpened end of his hockey blade – a legal move that left Orsilia down their best scorer and the crowd energized by the sight of the enemy lying eviscerated on the ice.

After this the Blues had scored twice in rapid succession, much to the chagrin of their opponents, who were now trying to mount a comeback of their own. Blades flashed higher and higher as the blood flowed freely, giving the arena floor an ever-darkening crimson tinge while the hapless referee tried in vain to keep the rivals from simply hacking at each other rather than the puck.

At last the game degenerated into a full-blown melee at the visitors’ end of the rink when one of the Blues was tripped and several of the Orangemen raked their skates across him as he lay prone on the pinkish patch of ice, prompting the rest of Stabientia to abandon their scoring drive and defend their fallen teammate. As the crowd leapt to their feet, Julio noticed that one of the Orangemen had not been drawn into the fight, and was skating furiously back in his direction towards the opposite goal, which had been left unattended. While this was by no means a novel strategy in hockey, the gondolier sensed that there was something wrong – for even though the visiting attacker continued to pick up speed in his approach, he didn’t have the puck in his possession.

Julio looked on dumbfounded as the hockey crusader raised his blade with and leaped straight at him in the private box a bloodcurdling cry. Before he knew what was going on, however, he was thrown sidelong by something heavy. Tumbling painfully into the bleachers, he could hear shouting and a collective gasp of horror; as he was helped back to his feet by several adjacent spectators, Julio saw the menacing Orangeman being restrained by a throng of players and fans before the body of Sabatini’s bodyguard.

Having successfully shoved Julio out of harm’s way, Vittorio had paid for his selflessness with his life, the assailant’s hockey blade cleaving his skull in half and killing him instantly. The gondolier stood in shock as the world around him appeared to move in a blinding and deafening blur, as if he were deep underwater trying to make sense of something happening above the surface.

Vaguely he sensed Evangelina taking him by the hand and pulling him away from the roaring crowd, away from the pink ice, away from the bodyguard and his oozing brains and into the cool, quiet, and sane evening air. The songstress bundled her driver into the passenger seat of his ’21 Magliozzi and, casting off the bowline, poled the gondola away from the still-pulsing hockey arena into the soothing anonymity of dark waters.

“I’m sorry,” she murmured to Julio. “I’m so sorry.”

When the dull roar of shock had finally left him, Julio returned to his senses somewhat to find his passenger standing at the stern with one hand on the tiller and a sad smile on her face.

“Where are we?”

Evangelina shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. Just somewhere else.”

Julio nodded. “Are you okay?”

“Me!” The girl was amazed at the question. “You were the one who almost lost your head.”

“Don’t remind me. What was that all about?”

“I told you that Sabatini has enemies. Evidently someone bribed Orsilia to do a hit tonight. Of course they didn’t know that Francesco wasn’t going to be there tonight.”

“Did Sabatini know?”

Evangelina bristled. “Do you think he would have let us go if he did?”

“You didn’t answer the question.”

“Look, I’m never going to be able to convince you that he’s a good man. And guess what? He’s not. I know that as well as you.”

“So why do you defend him - because he saved you?”

“No, because I save him.”

“Huh?”

“From himself.” Evangelina looked away from Julio down the empty canal into the darkness. There was a fog rolling in from offshore, its tendrils slowly creeping up Varo’s waterways and enveloping the City in its mists. This made the gloom seem closer and more intimate, and the songstress couldn’t help but shiver as she poled the gondola through it.

Julio sat in silence for a long while as the two of them glided through the lifeless neighborhood, watching the bow of the Magliozzi cut a perfect v through the water. It was a slack tide, and the surface of the canal looked like thick smoky glass. “He was a bag man.”

“What?” Evangelina stopped punting as the gondolier broke their reverie.

“My father. He was a fisherman, of course, but dragging a purse seine didn’t pay enough to feed the family, so when he wasn’t out on the banks he hired his boat out to thieves. He was on a job when he got shot.”

“Oh, no.”

“We never knew the details, just that the heist had gone sour and people got killed. Their captain was actually a decent fellow, a Skraeling named Arlix, and even gave us some money for our troubles, even though he didn’t owe us anything.”

Evangelina said nothing as Julio paused, dragging his fingers through the dark waters of the canal.

“The funny thing is that none of us knew what he’d been up to until that night. Not even my mother. Somehow my father managed to put enough money on the table every week and that was enough for her. Why ask questions when other people didn’t have that much?

“They never found his body. My dad had always half- joked that he wanted to die at sea, but I don’t think he meant with a crossbow bolt in his back. The tides must have swept him out, down the Grand Canal. I used to think to wonder what happened to him. Did the sharks tear him limb from limb when he passed the bar and entered the open water? I’d like to imagine that he had been magically untouched, and that his body swam the Great Sea for alll time, riding the Eieronian tides like a dolphin off a ship’s bow.”

“Julio—“ Evangelina began, but the gondolier kept talking.

“I didn’t think I’d ever follow in the old man’s footsteps. His old fishing crew didn’t want me around. Even though they felt honor-bound to offer me his job, they knew I was bad luck and I did as well. Besides, I was always afraid that I’d be out dragging my net and I’d accidentally pull him back from the deep. I know that sounds crazy, but it’s all I could think about.

“But even after all of this, I couldn’t let go of the water. So I became a gondolier. At least this way I can be close to him.”

Evangelina nodded.

“I don’t know why I’m telling you all of this.”

“It’s okay.”

“At least my father did what he did for money.”

“Are you sure that’s why he did it?”

“What?” Julio suddenly sat upright. “How dare you!”

“Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about. Sometimes risk is its own reward. Sometimes danger is the reason, and the money a happy coincidence. I listen to you agonize about ending up like your father, but what if he had been doing exactly what he wanted to?”

“I don’t need to listen to this.” Julio’s ears were buzzing again, as if he were back at the arena and that berserk Orangeman was bearing down on him with his bloodied blade. Without thinking about what he was doing he stood up, causing the gondola to lurch dangerously to one side, then leapt to the adjacent quay.

“Wait! What are you doing?” Evangelina called out. “This is your goddamned boat…”

But the gondolier was already gone, lost in the thick fog.

Julio hadn’t run because Evangelina was telling him lies. Quite the contrary, actually— he knew all too well that the songstress had articulated something which was so manifestly true that it seemed impossible that others had not seen it beforehand.

His father had lived for the chase. It was how his seine boat could win year after year in the Fiesta della Madre race, and how his crew always somehow made it back to market hours before all of the other fishermen, despite having stayed out on the banks for longer. But these were lesser thrills. What if the stakes were higher? The dangers more immediate? Julio had only taken the slightest taste of this hidden life, this other Varo, but already it ran through his veins like an Eieronian tide.

Like father, like son.

For years Julio had managed to convince himself that his father was a failure, a moral exemplar of unredeemed potential that he had lived his life in opposition to, but as he paced furiously through the dark and mist-enshrouded alleyways he realized that the failure was in fact his.

Whereas his father had embraced his nature, Julio had run from it in horror. His father could only die as he lived, whereas Julio had spent his years sleepwalking in a living death. Only now could he see this, reflected in the steel blade of Sabatini’s would-be assassin and the dark pools of Evangelina’s eyes. So many years wasted! Why hadn’t his father told him?

Of course his father would have told him not to have anything to do with this world, hoping against hope that his seed had not bourne the curse which had infected him. But there was no escaping this wheel of destiny which seduced with its own inexorable velocity. It was never a matter of if, merely when. As Julio slowly made his way back to his tenement in Marilia, he at last understood this, and was not in the least bit surprised to find Evangelina waiting for him on his doorstep.

“What took you so long?” she asked.

---

Julio was not surprised when Sabatini summoned him the next day. He ascended the steps of the nightclub and was met with a curt but respectful nod from the majordomo, who bade him wait in the foyer as he informed his master that he had arrived. The gondolier marvelled at how large and empty this place seemed in the daylight, when by night the very walls pulsed with human flesh. Even at this early hour there were some hardy souls at the bar in their cups, as well as a couple of quiet liaisons happening in the booths that ringed the dance hall.

Just opposite the orchestra pit from where he stood, Julio caught the glance of an Omulian courtesan chatting with one of the club’s patrons. Her skin was jet black yet radiant, and her hair was a cascade of ebony ringlets. She was beautiful and no doubt impossibly expensive, Julio thought. As she noticed his attention, she smiled at him, causing the gondolier to blush. At this point the majordomo returned to conduct him up to the penthouse -- Julio saw the girl shrug and turn back to her gentleman caller, a Cebalese bruiser who looked like he broke enough bones to afford her rates.

Francesco Sabatini did not believe in frivolous displays of wealth. Although he had spared no expense in furnishing his nightclub, the many denars he’d spent on the effort had crafted a theme of simple elegance that extended to his own personal quarters and office. Dark hardwoods and black velvet dominated the rooftop manse, with the occasional glint of gold in the gilding of the furniture or flash of silver in his tableware.

Aside from the requisite busts of ancestors long departed there was only one other piece of art to be found in the penthouse -- a small square painting which was mounted on a curious easel of brass tubes and knobs. As Julio peered more closely at this seemingly incongruous feature in the room, his host’s voice boomed from behind a desk of solid mahogany:

“Very interesting, si? It’s not like me to spend a small fortune on fine art when I can throw it away on fine wine and even finer women, but this painting is one of a kind. Go ahead, take a closer look.”

Julio did as he was instructed and noticed immediately what Sabatini had meant. The painting appeared to be a living thing, its colors heaving in a never-ending tension between the radiance at its center and the darkness which swirled around it like a frame of pure nothingness. The canvas depicted a young man and an older woman – the former lay stricken and wasted in the arms of the latter, a portrait of a Varonian noblewoman shielding herself and her lost companion against the all-embracing night.

“The artist was one of those dropouts from the Gearhouse,” Sabatini explained, referring to the community of artisans who had taken up shop in the derelict building atop Hightown from whence the sky gondolas used to descend to the Old Quarter. “He killed himself trying to finish this painting.”

The gondolier had been riveted to the square canvas, but his host’s words had roused him from that trancelike state. “Killed himself?”

“Yes. For as you can plainly see, he didn’t use the standard palette of colors to paint. Tell me, Julio, what do you know about El Mirad?”

Julio was suddenly fully alert. “I know enough to know that it’s very expensive. Expensive and dangerous.”

“Indeed,” Sabatini’s smile was that of a predator. “They say that El Mirad is a way of becoming like the gods themselves. Try it once and you are changed forever. This artist had mixed it with his pigments and painted with his fingers. Who knows what other visions he saw while under its spell!”

“Why are you telling me all of this?” While the gondolier appreciated the explanation, he sensed that Sabatini had not summoned him all the way here to converse with him about art.

Sabatini laughed. “Ah, yes-- to the point, I appreciate that. I wanted to thank you first and foremost for saving my life at the arena.”

Julio was still rattled by that near-death experience. “I did nothing of the sort. You weren’t even there.”

“Quite so. But had I been, who knows if my bodyguard would have been able to save me as he saved you. So again I wish to express my gratitude. Last time I gave you a job, but this time I wish to offer you an opportunity.”

“What kind of opportunity?”

“To follow in your father’s footsteps.”

Julio’s eyes flashed. “What do you know about my father!”

“More than you think. A long time ago I was part of Arlix’s crew. So was your dad.”

Julio said nothing to this; Sabatini continued.

“He was one hell of a boatsman. Knew the Eieronian tides like the back of his hand. I can’t tell you how many times he saved our behinds. Having your father at the helm often meant the difference between a job’s success or failure. Good ol’ Francesco.”

“Don’t say his name.” Julio couldn’t believe he was having this conversation, but here they were.

“That’s when people started calling me Sabatini. Arlix refused to have two Francescos on his crew. ‘I can barely tell you Varna apart as it is,’ he’d say. That Skraeling bastard. Your dad was already part of the crew when I joined, so everyone just called me by my family name.

“Did you know he used to brag about you all the time? ‘My boy,’ he’d say. Mi bambino. ‘You should see him handle a dory. Better than his old man! He’s going to be somebody someday.’ We’d tease your old man relentlessly about not being able to shut up, but he couldn’t help himself. He loved you.

“And more to the point, he was dead on about you. I’ve seen you race – you’re a natural.”

“You’ve seen me race! Where?”

“Don’t play stupid, boy. You think I don’t know the Flats? You gondoliers race there whenever there’s a good outgoing rip. It’s one of the best betting venues in the whole goddamned City.”

Julio smiled despite himself. The Flats were where the Bay of Skulls curved into the southwestern bosom of Varo’s manmade archipelago, a series of low-lying shoals and reefs that became a roiling sheet of whitewater when Eieron held sway over the Sea of Sunken Hopes.

It was true that Julio liked to race here, as did many of his profession, although in recent years he had done so less and less. Even though there was nothing formal about the competition whatsoever, he knew that people routinely bet small fortunes on the outcome of their races, so it didn’t surprise him all that much to learn that Francesco Sabatini had been one of those speculators. What did shock Julio, however, was the fact that he’d been watched for all these years.

“I made it a point never to bet against you,” Sabatini continued, “and I was richly rewarded for my faith. And now I’m willing to lay down a larger wager – a much larger wager.”

Julio now understood what all of this had been building towards. “What do you want me to do?”

Sabatini smiled broadly at this. “I need you to drive very fast...

“There’s a ship docked up near Stabientia called the Akar. It’s an Omulian blockade runner, and right now its hold is just about to burst with a fresh shipment of El Mirad from the Aeedian Coast. The Akar comes to the City every two months or so at the bidding of Yan Liao. If you don’t know who he is, consider yourself fortunate. He controls the El Mirad trade throughout the Three Parishes and beyond, and as such has been a perpetual thorn in my side. As a result I have to ply my trade on the sly, dealing under Liao’s nose.

"Since he’s a greedy bastard many of his customers are more than willing to give me their business, and with Evangelina’s good looks and club connections I’ve been able to do just that. Not surprisingly the King of Shit Farmers doesn’t appreciate having his prices undercut, but even I didn’t think he’d actually try and put a hit out on me. For that he must pay.”

Julio took all of this information in without a word or even so much as a breath, lest the pieces of this puzzle stop falling into place as perfectly as they were right now. Of course Evangelina had the perfect cover: a songstress making her rounds on the club circuit, with the perfect access to the illicit markets of Varo’s underbelly.

No wonder she was always on the run, always in danger. He had wondered who would have sent a platoon of Cebalese killers after her on that night they had met, when by chance she’d jumped into the passenger seat of his gondola. But had it been by chance after all? Before he had a chance to follow this line of reasoning any further, Sabatini continued:

“We’re going to rob the Akar. Liao’s forces are all over the place right now because of a dust-up between him and Arlix as well as some kind of internal shakeup going on with some of his Southlander mules, so we know he’s not protecting the boat as well as he could be right now. If we move in fast and get away even faster, we have a damned good chance of pulling this heist off.

"This is where you come in, son. We have a seine boat that we use for big jobs. I know you can pilot one because your old man taught you how to do it. Tomorrow night we’ve got an Eironian tide, which means the Grand Canal is going to be perfect for a getaway with the right man at the helm.

“So-- are you in?”

No sooner had Julio assented than Sabatini bade his majordomo to bring up a magnum of Aubornese champagne and several girls, including the beautiful Omulian that he’d seen chatting at the bar downstairs. To the gondolier’s utter surprise the latter lavished all of her attention on him from the moment she entered the room. Julio couldn’t recall if he had ever learned her name, but several bottles of wine later and all that he would remember the next morning through a pounding hangover was a blur of her dark flesh, her not-so-innocent laughter, and her onyx lips all over his body.

He wasn’t sure exactly how he had gotten home that night, but he awoke in his bed with a start all the same, roused by the tolling of the Marilia clock tower from yet another dream of swift ships and rushing tides. It was late enough in the afternoon that Evangelina would be wondering where he was, so he shook off his grogginess and changed his tunic, leaving his apartment in a hurry to find his fare sitting at the quay in front of his gondola with a scowl on her face.

“Enjoy yourself last night?”

Julio, still sleepy and hungover, did not have an immediate answer. When he did at last open his mouth to speak, however, Evangelina cut him off—

“Don’t bother. Francesco already told me. Sorry I missed the party.”

The gondolier was confused by the songstress’ tone. “Did I do something wrong?”

Evangelina looked at Julio with eyes that were fierce but just as uncertain. There are moments on which entire worlds hang, critical junctures of potential at which the right word or gesture can change everything for good. As the two wrestled with this awkward conversation both of them were fully aware of the fact that they were in just such a moment, but try as they might neither of them could summon that magical combination of expression that would set them free.

“Of course not,” she said. “Let’s go.”

After an evening of mechanically rowing Evangelina through what he now knew were her rounds secretly dealing El Mirad to Liao’s dissatisfied customers, Julio left the songstress at the stoop of her apartment without a word and started to poled his way back to Sabatini’s. Evangelina began to ascend the steps of tenement, then stopped and turned around:

“Jules, wait!”

Almost out of earshot, Julio for some reason had been expecting Evangelina to call out, and was moving his gondola as slowly as he could against the current of the canal so that he’d hear her if she did. Now as he looked over his shoulder he could see the songstress running along the granite quay towards him. All he needed to do was stop his boat and there could be a new moment, a second chance. But as strong as Evangelina’s pull was on his soul, there was another, deeper tug – that of the trickster moon.

It was almost high tide.

---

Even at night with its sails furled, the Akar was a sight to behold as she sat anchored off Stabienta’s promenade, the black lacquer of her hull reflecting the lights of evening revelers and merchants on the quayside. Built in a shipyard along the Omulian coast, the vessel and those of her kind represented a departure from that unmistakable Varonian prototype of the galley. The ships turned out day and night by the City at the Arsenal were outfitted with banks upon banks of oars for their propulsion, whereas the Akar was a creature of the winds.

While a Varonian galley might require scores of men for a proper crew, despite her size the Akar had been ingeniously rigged so that one soul could sail her. At first glance she appeared to be a yacht, some windjamming plaything of the idle rich, but upon closer inspection one noticed the Akar’s deep cargo holds as well as the reinforced port and starboard bulwarks behind which twin banks of repeating crossbows had been mounted and the onager which stood ready on the bow. But the Akar was not a warship. She had been built for speed, and as Julio approached her under the cover of darkness in Sabatini’s seine boat he was awed by the dark ship’s sleek majesty.

They had set out from Marilia shortly before midnight with six men at the oars and Julio at the stern, guiding the boat expertly through the roiling dark waters. Francesco Sabatini had spared no expense on his tide charts, and as a result they knew exactly when Eieron would make its closest pass, turning the already-churning outgoing tide into a seaward torrent.

The gondolier looked at Sabatini riding in the seine boat’s prow. The man had eschewed his customary black velvet for this evening’s heist, opting instead for Ferrari drag like the rest of his crew, but still he managed to cut a profile of cultivated elegance that made him seem all the more dangerous.

Julio was at first surprised that someone of Sabatini’s rank would have joined such a mission, but given the stakes involved he imagined that the damin did not want to place his trust in another, not so much out of fear of failure but betrayal. The El Mirad which lay in the Akar’s belly represented too great a temptation to even the most loyal captain, and although Sabatini only surrounded himself with trusted men he was no fool.

A seine boat was a particularly clever means of pulling off this job, as it could ride low enough in the water to accommodate the stolen cargo without sacrificing speed or maneuverability. In the hands of an expert rower, these vessels routinely braved the open seas while laden with thousands of pounds of fish, and even as the trickster moon began to exert its baleful influence over the Grand Canal Julio managed to keep an even keel while he closed in on the Akar, tracing a long loop against the tide so that they would approach the schooner from the ship’s least defensible position at rest – her prow. If they had been spotted on open water, the siege engine on the Akar’s foredeck would have been able to destroy the seine boat with one shot, but here on the Canal there would be no spotter on duty, or so they hoped.

“Once we’re underneath her prow, we’ll fix grappling hooks and climb up,” Sabatini explained the plan one last time as the men rowed and Julio watched for submerged hazards. “My scouts say there should be between ten and twelve on board at midnight, with guards posted fore and aft. If we can take out these guards before they can sound the general alarm, dispatching those below will be much easier. What I wouldn’t give to have Arlix here, though - that old Skraeling lived for this kind of action!

“As for you, Julio, your job is to sit tight and wait. If the heist goes wrong, we’ll give you the signal and you’re on your own. Otherwise you hold your position no matter what, capisce?”

These final instructions kept ringing in Julio’s ears, like the tolling of the midnight bell from Marilia’s piazza. Hold your position—no matter what. The gondolier had made a perfect approach, remaining in the Akar’s blind spot off her bow as they closed the final hundred yards and maneuvering the seine boat to exactly the right point to permit Sabatini and his crew to make their ascent undetected.

Shortly after the seven would-be thieves disappeared into the dark lacquer above his head Julio expected to hear some sign of a scuffle: a muffled cry, perhaps, or the telltale heavy thud of a body hitting the schooner’s deck. But there was nothing but the lapping of the waves against the hull of his boat and that of the Akar. This was far from reassuring to Julio’s jittery nerves, however, and as more time passed and the silence continued he began to worry that something had gone horribly wrong.

Sure, Sabatini had said there would be a signal if he were supposed to flee, but what if there had been no opportunity to give such a final directive? Julio held his breath and strained to hear something, anything, over the gathering Eieronian rip beneath his feet.

What he made out at last seemed impossible, and no sooner did he hear it than he was shimmying up the grapple to the Akar’s deck and scrambling towards its source, down a ladder and into the forward hold, where Julio came face to face with a ghost.

“Dad?”

Francesco Moltisante stood before him, the look on his face as astonished as Julio’s. He stood amid a throng of Omulians and Cebalaese who were holding what was left of Sabatini’s crew at bay with their scimitars; Francesco Sabatini was facing down a heavy crossbow trained on his Adam’s apple by the living dead apparition, but smiled wickedly when the gondolier had burst into the room.

“Julio. Is that you?” the elder Francesco could not believe his eyes, just as his son had not believe his ears. During that briefest of instants his attention wavered, and sensing his opportunity Sabatini fell back to grab the boy, producing a knife from the folds of his overcoat and holding it at Julio’s throat. The sword-wielding thugs started to move to counter this new threat, but the old man shouted for them to stop, then growled at Sabatini:

“What is the meaning of this!”

The younger Francesco chuckled, the steel of his blade biting into Julio’s flesh as he did so. “I’m just as surprised as you are, actually. When I hired your own son to help rob you I thought that would be payback enough for what you did to me, but seeing how that didn’t quite work out as planned I must say that this has played out much better than I could ever have planned.”

The captain of the Akar sputtered. “You sick bastard! I never wanted him involved in any of this.”

“Sorry, Francesco. There are no rules in this war – you know that as well as I do.”

“Dad.” Julio managed to croak out from under Sabatini’s knife. “How? Why?”

But there would be no opportunity for explanation. Sabatini had left his seventh man in the shadows in case of such a complication, and now he made his move, firing his crossbow through the doorway of the hold into the standoff. Julio watched in horror as a missile suddenly appeared in his father’s throat; he fell to the deck in a gurgling splash of blood.

“No!”

What happened next was a blur of steel and shouting, at the end of which Sabatini and his crew were the only ones left standing. Triumphant, the younger Julio ordered what was left of his men to start loading the Akar’s cargo into the seine boat still tethered beneath them, then put his hand on the shoulder of the gondolier, who had moved to cradle the elder Francesco’s dying body.

“Son, don’t waste your time. He abandoned you after all, didn’t he?”

Julio grabbed Sabatini’s hand with a grip of iron. “Don’t you dare touch me!”

The younger Francesco chuckled. “Suit yourself.” And with that Sabatini left father and son on the deck of the Akar. Julio could feel the life ebbing out of Francesco Moltisante, but nevertheless he managed to open his eyes one last time.

“Dad.”

“Mi bambino.”

As he reached up to touch his boy’s cheek, Francesco saw the Omulian killer approach them from behind. Then all was dark.

---

Evangelina stood on the stage of Sabatini’s club, singing her mournful dirge. It was a warm and humid night in the City, so those revelers taking in her performance from a distance might have assumed that her smudged makeup was the result of the heat. Francesco Sabatini knew better, however, and when the songstress paused between sets he appeared in her dressing room.

“Your mascara is running.”

“Is it?” Evangelina could not bear to look at Sabatini, and examined her visage in the mirror instead. “How careless of me!”

“You did a good job. Old man Moltisante never saw it coming. Without his kid on board who knows what would have happened.”

“That’s great,” the songstress tried to sound like she meant the words she said. Evangelina didn’t know whether Sabatini believed her or simply wanted to believe her enough that it didn’t matter, but he reached out to caress her bare shoulder nevertheless. Her skin crawled at the damin’s icy fingers, but as much as she wanted to cry out and tell him to leave her alone she suffered his touch in silence.

“Bene. Molto bene.”

She knew what he wanted when he murmured like that and drew near, but even though she was hopelessly in his thrall Evangelina still had her limits.

“Not now, Francesco. I have to go back out there.”

Sabatini seemed irritated, but withdrew his hand from her naked flesh. “Yes, of course. Afterwards then – okay, my love?”

Evangelina swallowed an ocean of bile. “Of course.”

As she turned and began to walk away, he called out:

“And sing something happy this time, capisce?”

The songstress took the stage again and indeed she sang a happy song— a melody of chance encounters and serendipitous love. Sabatini, assuming that the lyrics were about him, naturally loved it, which made it all the more difficult for Evangelina not to cry.

As she smiled at the killer sitting in his private booth she thought of how close she had come to telling that sweet gondolier boy the truth. Had she done so, he would almost certainly would be alive right now. They could have run, the two of them, run as far and as fast as they could to get away from her demon lover, the man who had saved her from a living hell for a life that was unimaginably worse.

Maybe Julio could have done it. Maybe he had been fast enough, clever enough, strong enough. Maybe. But now she would never know. The coiled white gold serpents bit into the flesh of her left wrist as Evangelina clenched her fists and stifled her rage, her sorrow, and her loss, swallowing it deep as she made love with her voice to the only man who had treated her with respect and died senselessly for it.

Somewhere far away from the City, two dark forms swiftly glided along the Eieronian rip, following the trickster moon in its erratic course across the night sky. The bodies of Francesco Moltisante and his son Julio had been lashed together, then tied to a ballast stone, but Sabatini’s thugs – not knowing a proper square knot between the lot of them—had done a poor enough job of weighing the corpses down that no sooner had they hit the water than they’d risen again and floated away faster than anyone on the deck of the Akar could retrieve them. This would in fact happen again and again as the odd purse seiner or far trader noticed the curious intertwined bundle of flesh on the waters and tried to fish them out.

It was almost as if they were meant to ride those fast currents together forever, until Eieron himself tired of carrying them.