repairs?” The steward took the liberty to inspect the damage, then clucked over the crack found in one of the casement mullions. “The urchins are sent to the docks, where forced labourers pick apart worn ropes for oakum. They serve a month for every silver sentenced in recompense.”
The brisk move as Lysaer shoved upright stirred the air like the first hint of storm. “Get Dace up here to polish my boots. I’ll be off to the magistrate inside the hour.”
The steward bowed. “Your Lordship, my word is sufficient to seal the conviction. No need to address this low grievance in person.”
Lysaer’s fixed regard never wavered, clear as a mineral pool before the geyser’s eruption. “I have no complaint to press charges. None whatsoever. My purse will settle the landlord. And the fine, if your accusation is not proven spurious. Now send Dace!”
“The boy Quince will tend your footwear,” said the steward, his arch condescension routine to coddle a flighty lord’s fancy.
Lysaer’s firm response still raised no flag of warning. “Dace is off on an errand? I’ll await his return.”
The steward rubbed his hook-nose, discommoded. “Then your boots will be polished by my own hand, while the matter of finding a glazier awaits on your vanity.”
Where another aristocrat might have deferred, Lysaer’s silken inquiry pressed, “Where is Dace?”
The steward prevaricated. “Milord, such unpleasantness is beneath your attention.” Given no leave to dismiss the question, he squared his tapered shoulders. “If you insist, regretfully, I’ve just dismissed Dace for thievery.”
Lysaer said nothing with such elegance, the steward cleared his dry throat. “I don’t know what the wretch stole, milord.” Deceit flowed off his oily tongue. “That would be the cook’s grievance.”
“My business alone!” Lysaer rebuked. “Dace is part of my retinue, fellow, and no lackey attached to this house. If the resident staff is displeased with his conduct, I expect the malfeasance brought to me directly. I will not be deferred. Fetch Dace back. I want him retrieved from the street before sundown unless you prefer your own trip to the magistrate to save him from a vagrancy charge!”
“You’re too generous with petty dishonesty, milord,” the steward chided. “By far too forgiving as well. The man’s of dubious background. Scarcely quality, and I would further suggest, unworthy of your noble stature.”
Lysaer smiled with corrosive contempt. “I’m not forgiving, or overly generous. Cross me, and the fine for this case will be docked from your payshare.”
The steward blanched, stiffly bowed, and departed. Sweat moistened his nape as he clicked the door shut. Not from the afternoon’s stifling heat but sprung from the dreadful, sudden awareness he had tweaked the tail of a sleeping tiger.
Alone once again, Lysaer strode to his desk and sat down. He unclenched his right fist, smoothed the rag held wadded inside, and reviewed its message in crudely stained writing. Then he took up fresh paper and quill and composed a cryptic response.
“Spend this for a private room at the Galley-men’s Rest, and above all, avoid being seen. Stay until I come myself.”
Lysaer sanded the ink. He folded the note around a ten-royal silver piece, then sealed it with wax and a torn scrap of cloth: a distinctive fawn linen, torn from the lined jacket of one of his liveried servants. His mouth a clamped line that made state envoys cringe, he lobbed the packet through the broken pane. Then he polished his own boots with grim intent to impose upon East Bransing’s magistrate, then proceed with a meeting of greater importance.
The Galley-men’s Rest straddled the breakwater, a concoction of plank walls and shake roof propped upright on gangling stilts. Renovated from a pierside fish-shack, the structure looked ready to slide with a tired splash into the harbour. A rope-slung gangway bridged the canal sloshed by the incoming tide. The propped-open door-panels sported matched port-holes, salvaged off a scuttled shrimp-boat.
Arrived in the blued shadow that silted the entry, Dace Marley paused and surveyed the tap-room throng: a garrulous stew of crews from the mackerel skiffs and shirtless stevedores come straight off the docks. Gin sold at a tuppence the tot, which a slogan scrawled over the bar claimed to sprout curly hair on a virgin’s tits.
Dace breathed a fust of alcohol fumes thick enough to fuel the bull’s-eye lamps. Several sawn off oar-handles leaned by the tap, ready bludgeons to quell drunken riots.
The lowbrow dive was a sly choice: inconceivable, that the Light’s avatar would rub shoulders with such unsavoury company. Dace waded into the raucous heave. He by-passed a dice game, ducked a contest at darts, and two meaty fellows locked in an arm wrestle, circled by bettors screaming encouragement. Grotesquely displaced, Dace was greeted with mockery.
“Lost your way, fella?”
“Come in slumming for a two-minute trick?”
And from the one-eyed smith in the corner, picking his teeth with a meat skewer, “How much d’ye charge to lick a man’s todger to a spit polish?”
Dace grinned. He had worked the rough bars in Etarra as a pretty young woman, unfazed. “How much would it take to watch you do the same for everyone’s wide-eyed amusement?”
Through the startled laughter provoked by his cheek, Dace inquired after a private room.
Whiskered in wool almost to the eyebrows, the landlord weighed the request. “Would that be for a bed with one doxie or two?”
Dace raised open palms. “No wenches.” Before the onlookers made sport, he retorted, “I’ve two soft hands, after all. They’re clean, I know where they’ve been, and better, their service is free.”
The obscene roar of approval rattled the rafters, while the floor-boards shuddered to the tidal chop that slopped against the slimed pylons. Dace ignored the next round of chaffing and offered up Lysaer’s ten piece.
The landlord claimed the coin with a moist fist. “Ah! That particular room, reserved for the gentleman, is it? The fee doesn’t budge.” A deft move whisked the bribe out of sight and bestowed upon Dace a grimed key. “Under the stairs and out the back door. Take a stroll down the dock. The quarters for blueblood whoring are under the copper cupola.”
Dace acquiesced to the landlord’s extortion and made his way through the rear exit.
The annex reserved for private dalliance was a gazebo, enclosed in weathered clapboard and roofed in the verdigris scrap of old sheathing torn off of derelict hulls. Dace approached, touched by a sudden qualm, as if an incipient warning of danger crossed the straight grain of Lysaer’s orders. Yet he had to earn the unquestioned trust his true purpose required.
Dace poised at the door-sill under the glare of full sunlight. Nothing seemed untoward. Wavelets lapped and sucked at the pilings. The strident gulls mobbing the fish pier sliced the bustle of late-day commerce eclipsed by the board wall of the Galley-men’s Rest.
Dace slotted the grimed key and turned the lock, jumpy as a dropped cat as the panel swung inward. With reason: the gloom beyond held two hooded fellows of muscular build, shod in hobnailed boots out of place on the docks. With them, ghostly white, two more figures wore the robes of Sunwheel priests. Neither of their startled faces belonged to that morning’s temple informant. Dace recoiled, too late. A hard blow slammed into his nape from behind.
As he folded, someone’s mailed grip crammed an astringent, damp cloth over his nose and mouth. A second punch in the belly drove the air from his lungs. Reflex forced him to inhale the drugged fumes. He succumbed to nauseous, wheeling dizziness and sagged into a faint.
Dace woke to a fire-ball searing his skull, and a dry mouth that tasted like ashes. The malaise of the narcotic and the bludgeon just used to fell him, or so he supposed, until his muddled senses picked out the pressure of moist hands clasped at his temples. The intrusive hold sourced the unbearable headache, and more, he felt as though a cincture