“No.”
She paused. “Why not?”
He should lie. Tell her he had previous commitments. “I’ve become… involved.”
“Oh no. Adamat, what the pit did you do?”
He stifled a smile. He loved it when she swore. “Not like that. No. Tonight’s summons. Field Marshal Tamas has a task for me.”
She scowled. “Only he’d have the rocks to pull down a king. Well, stop grinning and summon a carriage and help the children with their shoes.” She made a brushing motion with her hand. “Go on!”
Twenty minutes later, Adamat watched as his family piled into a pair of carriages. He paid the drivers and stood for a moment with his wife. “If the riots seem to be moving toward you, don’t hesitate to take the children to Deliv. I’ll come find you when things have settled down.”
Faye’s face – usually harsh, firmly disapproving – was suddenly soft. She was young again in his eyes, a worried girl waiting for her lover to walk the midnight roads. She leaned forward and kissed him tenderly on the lips. “What should I tell the children?”
“Don’t lie to them,” Adamat said. “They’re old enough.”
“They’ll worry. Especially Astrit.”
“Of course,” Adamat said.
Faye sniffed. “I haven’t been to Offendale since we went on holiday after Astrit was born. Is the house there in good order?”
“It’ll be small,” Adamat said. “Cozy. But safe. Do you remember our code phrases? The post office is in the next town. I’ll send a letter to Saddie asking her to bring you the mail.”
“Is all that necessary?” Faye asked. “I thought it was just riots.”
“Field Marshal Tamas is a dangerous man,” Adamat said. “I don’t…” He paused. “Just as a precaution. Humor me.”
Faye said, “Of course. Take care of yourself.” Adamat returned his wife’s kiss, then leaned in the window of each carriage in turn, giving every one of the nine children a kiss, two for each of the twins. He stopped at Astrit and knelt down on the floor of the carriage to look her in the eye. “You’ll be away for a couple of weeks. The city is going to be a bit rough.”
“Why aren’t you coming?” she asked.
“I’ve got to help make it safer.” He thought of Kresimir’s Broken Promise. The words made him shiver.
“Are you cold?” Astrit asked.
He brushed a finger across her cheek. “Yes,” he said. “It’s very chilly. I’d better go in before I catch cold. Have a safe trip!”
He closed the carriage door and stood in the street, watching them trundle off until they turned a corner. He would miss Faye for many reasons. When it came to his investigations, she was more than a wife to him. She was a partner. She had a vast network of friends and acquaintances and knew how to coerce gossip to find out information that even he could not turn up.
He headed back to the house, stopping for a moment only as he saw a movement in a doorway across the street. A young man in a long, stiff coat emerged from the shadows and headed off in the opposite direction from the carriages. He spared one glance for Adamat and doubled his step.
Adamat watched the young man go, making sure the stranger felt his gaze. One of Palagyi’s goons, no doubt. Adamat would hear from him shortly. Adamat returned to the house, locking the door behind him, and went immediately to the study. He dug through his desk drawers until he found a stack of stationery.
The sun had finally touched his study window, looking in over the houses and the distant mountains, when Adamat finished addressing letters. His hand ached from writing, and his candle had burned to a nub. He yawned, letting his mind wander for a moment, when the faint scratching sound of metal on metal caught his ear.
Adamat pushed the whole stack of letters into a desk drawer and locked it. He picked up his cane and twisted until it clicked, then walked through the house, listening for the sound. He reached a rear door, small and old, that led to an overgrown trellis in what amounted to their garden between their house and the one behind it. The garden could be reached from the house itself or from a small corridor that ran between two houses, which contained a locked gate.
Adamat jerked the door open, cane in hand. Three men stared back at him. Two of them wore the faded coats and simple brimmed hats of street workers. The one’s knees and shirtsleeves were stained black – likely from shoveling coal into a furnace – and the second, the lockpick, wore clothes much too big for him, the common practice of a street thief who wanted to secret a number of things about his person. The third man was richly dressed, a gray overcoat over a sharp black waistcoat, and had shoes shined well enough that one could check one’s teeth in them.
The lockpick gaped up at Adamat from his knees.
“You’re making enough noise, you might as well have knocked on the front door,” Adamat said. He sighed and lowered his cane and spoke to the best-dressed of the three. “What do you want, Palagyi?”
Palagyi seemed surprised to see him here. He pushed at a pair of round spectacles that rested more on his chubby cheeks than on his thin nose. The man was an oddity, with a body that would seem more at home in a circus than anywhere else. He had a round belly that hung far over his belt, but his arms and legs were no thicker than a sapling. It made him look like an oversized cannonball with sticks for arms.
He was a longtime street thug who had just enough ruthlessness to rise to legitimate businesses and not quite enough intelligence to leave his dark life behind him. Aptly suited as a banker. Adamat cataloged his criminal record in his mind in an instant.
“Word had it that you’d skipped town,” Palagyi said.
“You mean the word of that inbred you’ve had skulking around my house for the last couple of weeks?”
“I have a reason to keep my eye on you.” He seemed annoyed that Adamat was actually still there.
Adamat gave a long-suffering sigh and watched Palagyi grind his teeth. Palagyi hated when he wasn’t taken seriously. He’d changed little since he was just a half-drunk loan shark. “I’ve got two months until my debt is due.”
“There is absolutely no way you’re going to gather seventy thousand krana in two months. So when I hear your family is skipping town in the middle of the night, I think perhaps you’ve decided to take the coward’s way and run for it.”
“Careful who you call a coward,” Adamat said. He reversed his grip on his cane.
Palagyi flinched. “I took my last beating from you long ago,” he said, “and you’re no longer protected by the police. You’re just one of us now, an ordinary gutter rat. You shouldn’t have taken out a loan with me.” He laughed. It was a tinny sound that grated on Adamat’s nerves.
It was Adamat’s turn to grind his teeth. He’d not taken out a loan from Palagyi, but from a bank belonging to a friend. That friend proved a bad one when he sold the loan to Palagyi for nearly one hundred and fifty percent of its worth. Palagyi had promptly tripled the interest and sat back and waited for Adamat’s new publishing business to fail. Which it had.
Palagyi wiped a tear of mirth from his eye and snorted. “When I learn that one of my biggest private loans has sent his family out of town just two months before his loan is due, I check on it personally.”
“And try to break into his house?” Adamat said. “You can’t clean me out and throw us onto the street until after I’ve defaulted.”
“Perhaps I got greedy.” Palagyi smiled thinly. “Now, I’m going to need to know where your family is so that I can check in on them.”
Adamat spoke through clenched teeth. “They’re at my cousin’s. East of Nafolk. Check all you want.”
“Good. I will.” Palagyi turned to go, when he stopped suddenly. “What’s your girl’s name? The youngest one. I think I’ll have some of my boys bring her back, just in case you try to slip onto one of those new steamers and make for Fatrasta.”
Palagyi had just enough time to flinch before Adamat’s cane cracked over his shoulder. Palagyi cried out and stumbled into the garden. The coal shoveler punched Adamat in the belly.