Vare, roused by the knocking, descended the stairs in his nightclothes. When he saw Lano, he smiled. They’d known each other a long time, since before the sacking at the magitarium. They’d been unfriendly then, but now that they both belonged to the tiny fellowship of survivors, their interests had come into alignment, bringing friendship along with them.
Vare shooed the girl out of the entranceway and led Lano inside.
“I saw you were back,” Lano said, doffing his coat.
Vare clapped his old friend on the back. “Good to see you. Are you overrun with famine rats?”
Lano straightened his collar. “My cook sweeps them off the porch in the morning.” He glanced at the housekeeper, who stood on the threshold between the parlor and the adjacent hallway leading to the kitchen, waiting to see if they had an order. “Sad though, isn’t it? Watching the children go off into the gutters to die? I have to keep an eye on the larder or the servants would throw half of it to the brats and then we’d all be starving.”
The housekeeper paled but said nothing. Vare eyed her, mentally noting the need to revisit this conversation with her later to make sure that if she had been stealing from him, she would never do so again.
Now was not the time. “Is standing here the best you have to do?” Vare snapped.
Silently, the housekeeper bustled toward her tasks.
Lano strolled further into the parlor, surveying the broken mantel and hard-worn furniture. The room had been grand at one time, but now most of its floor-space lay empty, only an island by the door populated with the ruined remains of the home’s former elegance.
Lano was a tall man, the kind who always walked with a self-conscious hunch that worked to his advantage; it nudged people into underestimating him. Pulled to his full height, he looked like a line drawn crookedly on a page, spindly and precarious on slightly malformed legs.
He looked down at Delira in repose and then walked over to Ayl. “Famine rats?”
Vare grinned. “Look closer.”
Bending nearly in half so that he could reach the skinny girl, Lano pried Ayl’s clenched fingers apart. Even in their current state, the girl’s hands were unmistakably smooth and callous-free, a rich girl’s hands. Lano looked up with a query on his face.
Vare’s grin widened. “Berrat’s brats. Both of them.”
Awe brushed Lano’s voice. “You did it.”
He turned back to regard the girls again. He moved toward Delira and swept the mahogany curls away from her cheeks so that he could see her eyes, those same grey eyes that stared out of Berrat’s face in the portraits that hung in every church in the city.
“I don’t believe it,” Lano said.
“They’re mine now,” Vare answered.
“Why did you bring them back?”
“For proof!” It wasn’t the truth, or not the whole of it, but Lano seemed to accept the answer.
Lano stroked Delira from forehead to throat. Her skin moved beneath his hand, loosened by insects that lived within.
He’d been a powerful man once, Lano. He’d kept the books for the mages, his finger on the pulse of the money flowing in and out, much of it into his own pockets. He’d been at the center of a vast network of underground activity. Money-man to money-man, he’d coordinated the exchanges between magitoriums. He’d sat to dinner with dukes, been rewarded by queens, all for slipping the right charm between the right lips for the right price.
How reduced he looked in his shabby shirtsleeves, touching the face of a girl he could once have bought and sold.
“What are you going to do with them?” Lano asked.
“I haven’t decided,” Vare said.
Lano tugged his collar. “The famine rats are in everything. They fight and steal. The duke’s men are strung thin keeping them from killing us all. There’s no one to stop us trading more than minor spells.”
Vare raised his brows.
“Rusk has a shop set up on Headrow,” Lano continued.
Vare considered. “He has something for corpses?”
“He has something for everything.”
PART FIVE: MAGGOTS
Rusk’s shop was barely a few feet square. It stank of vomit, sweat, and sawdust. Probably, the space had once been the back room of some tavern where sluts took patrons who had a few extra coins.
Rusk sat on a three-legged stool, jammed in the back corner, boxes piled at his feet. Metal fragments glistened, an array of springs and tools and other things that would be completely useless if one didn’t know how to assemble them. He looked the same as he always had, short and somewhat fat, wearing an expensive suit of clothes that had been worn past repair. His fur collar looked like it wanted to strangle him.
Rusk had been the magitorium’s mechanic, preparing mage-rendered goods for use by public hands. These days, he played both mechanic and merchant, treading carefully through the shadowy stalls of the black marketplace.
He raised his hand to greet Lano and then looked at Vare with surprise. “You’re back! You whore’s son!” He got to his feet to hug his friend, but halted when he saw the wheelbarrow at Vare’s feet. He leaned toward the strange, lumpy bundle. Gagging, he covered his nose. “The hells?”
In answer, Vare stooped to lift out the still-wrapped girls, Lano bending to assist. He unloaded them on the floor and began untying the ropes. “You won’t guess who they are,” he said.
Rusk leaned even closer, still holding his nose, and watched as Delira’s arm flopped out of the bundle. He grabbed her shoulder and tugged her free of the blanket. Her flesh made strange noises under his grip, threatened to slide off like cooked turkey skin. Mahogany curls fell aside and Rusk saw the grey eyes.
“Berrat’s!” Rusk exclaimed. “No! Both of them?”
Vare freed Ayl’s hand from the blanket so that she lay beside her sister. “Assuredly.”
“You whore’s son!” Rusk repeated. “How did you do it?”
Lano’s face mirrored Rusk’s curiosity, for in the fuss of discovering the girls and helping Vare move them, he hadn’t had a chance to ask the question himself.
Vare recounted the tale of his past ten years, including the parts to which Rusk and Lano had been witness. Rusk had provided (at cost) the mage-charms that kept Vare safe in Whitcry, and Lano had pulled his connections’ strings until he found a forger that could get Vare into the city without being questioned. The two of them sat patiently through the familiar parts of the tale, knowing that they led to the reward, the details of how Vare had infiltrated Berrat’s household, how he’d delivered the poison, and how the girls died.
“Did you see him?” Lano asked, meaning Berrat.
“From a distance.”
Lano looked disappointed.
“He might have recognized me,” Vare explained.
Lano’s brows drew down as if he didn’t believe that was the reason. In part, he was right; Vare looked so little like the man he’d been ten years ago that it was hard to believe anyone, even Berrat, would recognize him now. Perhaps it was cowardice that had kept him in the shadows, masked and silent. But still, wasn’t that why Vare had succeeded where others had failed? He hadn’t risked the thrill of seeing Berrat face to face, and unlike anyone else, he had managed to carry out his plan.
Rusk broke the uncomfortable pause. “Berrat must be bellowing. Tearing out his hair. Any news from Whitcry on how his holiness is taking it?”
Both Rusk and Vare looked to Lano whose connections made him most likely to know. The tall man shrugged his hunched shoulders.
“Ah well,” Rusk said. “He must be devastated. Any man would be. Let’s look at the beauties then, shall we?”