Turning Points (34 page)

Perrez clapped his brother on the arm and pointed at a tall man with gray-touched hair. His lips shaped the word
Nareel
. Bezul nodded and wished he could have asked Perrez if the aromacist regularly dressed in long black robes or tied an antique bronze breastplate over his chest—though, judging from the puzzled expression on his brother’s face, the answer would have been No.

The “worms” at whom Nareel shouted were a pair of laborers— the ragged unskilled sort who sometimes showed up on Wriggle Way, hoping to exchange their sweat for a few padpols. They’d dug themselves a pit a few paces north of the ruins’ center. Beyond them, three sell-swords who, together, wouldn’t be a match for either Ammen or Jopze, if Ammen or Jopze weren’t still in the Shambles. A sixth man stood east of the pit. Younger than Nareel and possibly his son, the sixth man also wore a long black robe, though without the shiny breastplate. He held a wicker-work triangle between his hands.

A bright-red lump dangled from the triangle’s peak. Although the light wasn’t good and the angle was worse, Bezul could see that the glass teardrop wasn’t hanging straight down, but strained toward the pit, pulled by an invisible hand. Bezul’s breath caught. Neither Perrez nor Dace had lied; the red lucky was filled with sorcery and, shite for sure, Nareel wasn’t hunting for crabs!

“See? I told you!” Perrez whispered excitedly. “Fish-eye sorcery. We’re rich!”

Bezul raised an arm to clout his brother, but before the blow landed, he had worse problems to contend with. The Nighter was up and on the move toward his damned lucky. Without thinking, Bezul lunged and tackled the youth. He’d swear the ground shook when they struck the ground and thunder was not half so loud. Bezul pinched his eyes shut, convinced that when he opened them, he’d be looking up into the face of his death.

“Sorry,” Dace said, the merest breath of voice in Bezul’s ear. “Can’t breathe.”

So Bezul moved and there were no sell-swords standing over him, no death awaiting him. He and the Nighter crawled back to Perrez. The reason for their survival was simple enough: Nareel and his men had been moving, making their own noises, at precisely the right moments.

The two diggers had climbed out of the pit. They and the sell-swords now stood together on the opposite side of the pit. The sell-swords had their hands on the hilts of their weapons, but they weren’t looking into the shadows where three spies were hiding. They were watching the pit and even at this distance, Bezul could see that they were afraid.

Bezul couldn’t fault them. When he looked, there were faint bluish flames rising from the hole and he was frightened, too. The younger man who’d carried the attractor had exchanged it for a plain, bronze disk, polished to a mirror shine, which he held before his face like a shield as he slowly circled the pit against the sun. Nareel had his back to Bezul, but he was also circling and his face would come into view—or rather, his mask, because it was clear that he, too, had a disk in front of his face, tied around his skull rather than held in his hands. Both black-robed men were chanting, not in unison, not in Ilsigi. Bezul didn’t recognize the language at all, and he’d heard a good many in the changing house. That added to his fear.

The bluish flames rising from the ground got brighter and sound, like a chorus of cicadas on a hot, summer night, emanated from them. Bezul looked at Perrez; Perrez was already looking at him. They didn’t need words: The aromacist hadn’t come to Sanctuary to look for gold, he’d come for sorcery and, thanks to Perrez, he’d found it. The world was full of sorcery, but sorcery that put fear in a man’s heart wasn’t welcome in Sanctuary. It was the one thing everyone agreed upon. Perrez had the decency to hang his head.

That was all Perrez did: He hung his head. He didn’t run, he didn’t hurl stones, didn’t do anything to make the rubble near them shift; but shift it did and this time the noise attracted the sell-swords’ attention. They advanced, drawing their weapons. Bezul grabbed his brother and the Nighter.

“Run!” he commanded them and shoved them toward the doorway as he cast a warning—not a prayer—to Father Ils in Paradise:
Take care of Chersey; make her strong for the children. Don’t blame her for my sins
. Then he pulled the fighting knife out of his boot. It wouldn’t serve against three swords, but it might give Perrez and Dace time to reach a street where the presence of passersby would protect them.

Bezul saw the sell-swords choose the doorway, not him, and somehow got in front of them, then desperation took control of his mind. He parried for his life—there was no thrusting with a knife against three swords—and parried a second time and a third, because he wasn’t dead yet and he wouldn’t stop fighting until he was. There were more swords, then fewer swords, screams, and a thunderclap so loud it flung Bezul into the wall.

His head cracked against the plastered brick; he lost consciousness for a heartbeat or two, just long enough for his heels to sink to the ground. A sell-sword charged toward him. Bezul could see his knife, flat across his palm, but his arm belonged to someone else when he tried to clench his hand around the hilt. It didn’t matter. The sell-sword wasn’t interested in him; he raced through the doorway without stopping to kill a defenseless man. The diggers staggered along behind the sell-sword which left two men standing in the ruins. Neither was a man Bezul had seen before.

The nearer of the pair, a man about Perrez’s age with a hardened face and a brawler’s body advanced toward Bezul. “You hurt?”

Bezul shook his head. With the wall solidly behind him, he pushed himself upright and looked around. One of the sell-swords lay motionless in the rubble. By the angle of his head and the size of the blood pool beneath it, he wouldn’t be getting up again. Nareel and his companion were down, too. The other victorious stranger—another man who preferred a one-color wardrobe: black boots, breeches, cloak, and tunic—prodded Nareel with his sword, trying to loosen the mask.

“What drew you here?” the brawler asked.

Bezul spotted the lucky red attractor, apparently unbroken. “That,” he said, pointing to it.

The brawler’s eyes all but disappeared in his scowl. “You’re the Shambles changer, right? What’s your tie to the sorcerer or a Beysib attractor?”

“It’s a long story,” Bezul answered with a weary nod. “I have a troublesome brother—”

A third stranger entered the ruins through the doorway. Short, shapeless and unbearded, Bezul decided the stranger was a man simply because he didn’t want to believe that a woman could be so ugly. The new arrival dipped his chin to the brawler and the man in black then, with more agility and speed than Bezul expected, leapt into the pit and out of it again, a deep blue enameled chest clutched like an infant in his arms.

“It’s all here,” he announced with a eunuch’s boyish voice.

“You’re froggin’ sure?” the brawler asked.

The eunuch patted the chest lovingly. “Have no doubts, Cauvin. We’re safe for another day… more than another day.”

Cauvin. Bezul knew a Cauvin… knew of one, anyway. The stonemason’s son from up on Pyrtanis Street, rescued from the palace after the Irrune slaughtered the Bloody Hand. The gossips said he was good with stone, better with his fists and not at all reluctant to use them.

But, perhaps, there was another Cauvin in Sanctuary.

His prize in hand, the eunuch waddled toward them. “One less problem to worry about, eh? No one stealing the sun, trapping it in a box?”

Cauvin didn’t answer, didn’t look like he particularly agreed. The eunuch giggled and for an instant his eyes glowed red, then he was gone.

“Wh—?” Bezul began.

“Don’t ask,” the brawler snarled, leaving Bezul with no doubt that there was only one Cauvin in Sanctuary.

“What do you want to do with the bodies?” the black-booted swordsman called from Nareel’s side.

“Shite if I know or care,” Cauvin muttered as he turned his back on Bezul.

The way out of the ruin was clear. A wise man—an ordinary man with a wife, children, and a business waiting for him—would take a few sideways steps and be gone. Bezul even took one of those sideways steps, before choosing against wisdom and striding toward the pit.

“This
thing
,” he said, pointing at the red glass. “It belongs to a young man who lives out in Night Secrets. I’d like to give it back to him. Apparently, it keeps his crab trap full.”

Cauvin and the swordsman stared at Bezul then at each other.

“Your call,” the swordsman said and, to emphasize the point, busied himself untying the mask from Nareel’s corpse. “Make up your mind. I can’t stay here. They’re expecting me across town. Never should have let you talk me into that one. Goes against my principles
and
then you tell me I’ve got to lose.”

Cauvin paid no attention to his sarcastic companion. “Froggin’ crabs?” he sputtered. “A froggin’ Nighter’s using a froggin’ attractor to trap froggin’ crabs?”

Bezul nodded. Against all expectation, the stonemason’s brawler-son was giving orders to swordsmen and sorcerers. He’d have to make inquiries after he got back to the Shambles. Until then, Bezul could sympathize with Cauvin’s frustration. “Probably the smartest thing you or I could do is break it into little pieces, but the Nighter wants it back. I don’t know if he eats the crabs or sells them; as Father Ils judges us all, I’m not sure if it’s his or his whole family’s. Either way, he calls it the ‘red lucky’ and my brother tricked him out of it. Then my brother lost it himself to that one there—”

Bezul gestured toward Nareel just as the swordsman lifted the mask. The black-clad man swore an oath in a language Bezul didn’t recognize and cast the mask aside. Nareel had died a hideous death, and not from the swordsman’s weapon. His face was blackened— cracked, curled and peeling, like a log left to char at the back of a hot fire. A breeze not strong enough to lift a lock of hair, set an ashy flake adrift. Bezul leapt backward to avoid contact with the flake; the other men did likewise as other bits of Nareel lifted into the quiet air.

The corpse began to crumble from within, shrinking and losing form. Bezul watched, transfixed, for one or two heartbeats, then forced himself to turn away. He steadied himself by breathing in through his nostrils and out between his lips—the way he’d learned years ago when the Bloody Hand of Dyareela summoned the city to public executions.

Not since the Troubles. Not since the Troubles
. The notion tumbled in Bezul’s mind along with
Who
? and
Why
? and
What manner of darkness has Perrez stumbled into
? He concentrated on the mask: a shallow bronze disk, polished smooth, without holes for sight, breath, or speech; but touched with gold and ringed with stylized flames.
A sun god
, Bezul told himself, not one he recognized, but not the Bloody Mother, Dyareela, either; and for that he was relieved.

Bezul’s relief was interrupted when the corpse of Nareel’s companion collapsed with a sigh, like air released from a bladder—a foul, rotting bladder. He recoiled from the sight and the stench; the swordsman did the same. But Cauvin leapt across the hole, seized a shovel the diggers had abandoned, and went to work with more effort than effect until the remains of both corpses were either in the hole, covered with a layer of dirt, or floating in the city breezes.

“Shite for sure,” the young man swore as he leaned, sweating and gasping, on the shovel, “I didn’t froggin’ ask for
thisl”

The swordsman said nothing and Bezul judged it was time for proper gratitude: “I owe you my life, and the lives of my brother and the Nighter, Dace. I think it would be us in that hole, were it not for your timely arrival.”

“Froggin’ shite, we were already here, waiting for Yorl to show up. You never know what he’s going to look like, so I thought, maybe, he was you—until nearly too late. Lucky we weren’t all froggin’ killed.”

Confused by the explanation, Bezul asked, “You were waiting for Nareel?”

“Yorl, Enas Yorl?” Cauvin paused, clearly expecting a reaction to the name, which Bezul didn’t provide. “You saw him. He’s the one who claimed the chest.” Cauvin shook his head. “He’s under some froggin’ curse that changes him every day, but his eyes give him away… most times. Sometimes, you froggin’ just don’t know.”

Bezul hadn’t heard the name, Enas Yorl, since before the Troubles started. Gedozia and the other gossips said the mage’s mansion had vanished one long-ago night with him in it—Come to think of it, the mansion had been up on Pyrtanis Street, same as the stoneyard where Cauvin worked with his father. Maybe that was the connection—

“You work for him?” Bezul asked and realized, before he’d finished asking the question, that he shouldn’t have.

“What’s the one true thing about Sanctuary?” Cauvin asked. He didn’t wait for an answer. “We’ve had our froggin’ fill of miracles and magic. A froggin’ priest comes to Sanctuary, he better talk about what his god does for us, not the other way around and a magician better keep to himself, if he knows what’s good for him. We like our froggin’ gods quiet and our froggin’ sorcerers even quieter. If they’re not, we’ll froggin’ run them out. And if we can’t, then there’s froggin’ Enas Yorl.”

The swordsman offered his opinion: “Better one man you can’t quite trust than a score of them?”

They glared at each other a moment before Cauvin insisted, “I froggin’ trust froggin’ Yorl.”

“But you knew about Nareel?” Bezul asked quickly, hoping to distract both men. ‘‘You know about that shop he has—had—off the Processional?”

“Anyone asks that many questions is bound to attract attention. He was wasting his time and his shaboozh until he got lucky—” Cauvin looked down at the red glass teardrop. He’d come close to breaking it with the shovel, but—luckily?—he’d missed every time. “Crabs? Frog all.”

“That’s what the Nighter said. They’ve been using it for years. Your Enas Yorl left it behind—”

“He said an attractor was just a tool,” the swordsman said, then added: “Don’t let it fall into the wrong hands.”

Bezul couldn’t tell if the man was speaking for himself or the absent magician, to him or to Cauvin.