Let's all be Peasants together
Apr. 22nd, 2007 08:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
clarentineMonday, April 23 has been designated International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day by popular acclaim. Make of the foofaraw behind it what you will (see ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
sfwa); what it is becoming will be more apparent, I think, tomorrow when more people have posted. At any rate, participating in this bit of sociological experimentation is fun. *g*
I'm posting tonight because my Mondays tend to be hellish. So, herewith find the first three chapters of the novel I'm currently using to troll for agents, the story called Cavalier Attitude. Allow me to introduce Dimo Avrila:
One
Dimolacan Avrila clung to the shutters and listened to the argument (many feet, and at least three voices) working its way up the stairs.
Weight balanced between the right-most shutter bracket and the slender line he’d climbed to reach this point, Dimo closed his eyes, the better to focus on what was being said, and scowled. It would have been nice if Reeslan had warned him how quickly the signet he'd just planted amongst the lady's other tokens of alliance would be “discovered.”
"But, my lord, what makes you think we would bring him into our circle?" A pretty voice, that, and well practiced; she made it sound as if she believed herself.
"Let’s just say, I have my sources." That one was smug rather than pretty. Dimo did not recall hearing the man’s voice before.
He did, unfortunately, recognize the sardonic laughter that followed. "A source with black skin and sharp little teeth, no doubt. And you believed your source, Feria. For shame."
A moment’s silence conveyed Feria’s shrug. "I’m happy to be proved wrong, Basilio. All the lady needs to do is show us that she hasn’t got the thing."
"But, my lord," she tried again, in a higher octave.
"I don’t care if she does have it," Basilio said, stomping over her whining as he stomped over everything else. "It’s time and past time for someone to step up and demand the king account for his behavior."
Laughter washed over Basilio’s sharp tones. "Someone, but just not you, eh, Basilio?"
Basilio snorted. Dimo’s lips pinched tight as he remembered the last time he’d been face to face with cousin Basilio and had to endure Basilio’s sneering certainty of his place in the galaxy of Guaymarien’s blooded families.
"I don’t really care whether Basilio’s grown a spine or not," Feria said. "What I care about is the penalty for treason, and whether someone here is guilty of soliciting me to commit it, and I have yet to hear any of you tell me why I shouldn’t be concerned."
"Treason!"
The wail echoed across the villa’s lovely garden and the parkland beyond. Dimo winced, then stayed as still as he knew how to be as the senora’s guards tromped past below the toes of his boots. A wind rippled the hood that covered his head and swathed his shoulders in sweat-inducing blackness--but he was not complaining over the discomfort. Reeslan’s little oversight aside, he could not let Basilio and the other highborn party-goers identify him as the interloper. Orators Guild thieves were exempt from punishment if seized, but Dimo had no such protection; he gambled his life and Timotayo’s on this little chess move of Reeslan’s. If it came to that, Basilio would be certain to insist the punishment be carried out, and Dimo valued his hands.
"You don’t think it’s treason to collude with foreigners?" Feria said, ignoring his wailing hostess.
"You don’t think it’s treason if the king is?" Basilio countered.
"I haven’t yet seen or heard someone with real information tell me that Felíp is playing games with the Sprites," Feria replied. "All your bluster aside, Basilio, you’ve shown me nothing I can trust to support your contention that Felíp should be separated from the throne. Now, if you’d be so kind, Isabel: your jewel box."
The cabinet door Dimo had been at such pains to open without damaging its little lock slammed open; the wood cracked as it was flung against the wall. The perfume bottles on the shelf above the jewel box rattled and chimed.
"There," the lady said, tears in her voice if not in her eyes. "Look if you must, my lord, but I insist-"
The argument came to a crashing halt, and then picked up again at an even greater volume.
"What is that doing in there!"
"I’d say my theory just grew legs."
"Someone," Basilio rumbled, "has put this here to implicate poor Isabel-"
"And you, and everyone else downstairs who was chattering earlier about how terrible it was what the king was doing, and shouldn’t we be doing something," Feria broke in. "Whether it got there as you say, or as I suspect, doesn’t really matter. I can read manipulation as well as the next man. Good evening, gentlemen, señora."
Dimo bit his lip and enjoyed, vicariously, the string of oaths that punctuated his cousin’s failure. Then he drew a soft breath, for Basilio had stopped swearing.
"When was the last time you were in here--in this box?" He must have shaken the señora, because she cried out and then began to sob. Flesh met flesh, ungently. "Enough of that. Was the ring in the box when you put on these baubles tonight?"
Sniff. "N-no. No, I’m sure it wasn’t."
The window frame creaked. Basilio’s breath was loud, and close. "Then the sneak is probably still on the premises." He withdrew. "Call your guards. Have them search the place."
Dimo did not wait to hear more. He wrapped the thin cord around his wrist, then down the dark side of the building he went, praying that Tayo had the horses ready.
Two
A night and a day later, Dimo stood with Tayo on a corner deep in Guaymarien’s ancient, tattered heart, patting dust from his clothes and cursing under his breath. The light had all but faded from the sky; at the next striking of the city’s bells, the old beggar who collected messages for Reeslan would head home from his uptown corner. A day’s delay in reporting the completion of most taskings did not trouble Dimo. Tonight, however, he had a bone to pick with Kellan Reeslan, Guildmaster of diplomats and thieves, and a niggling suspicion that he needed to report in sooner than later. And, as luck would have it, their way was blocked.
Laughter and the sounds of drums and horns carried down the narrow street. Dimo waved Tayo back, away from a chance sighting of their faces. The shortest path to Reeslan’s message-taker lay through the plaza in front of the city’s holiest cathedral--and that same plaza brimmed tonight with well-dressed cavaliers and señoras in their best finery, come to the sacred shrine to celebrate a wedding, the culmination of ten years’ negotiation and waiting on the part of the bridegroom and an affirmance of Dimo’s cousins’ families’ places amongst the most powerful in and of the land.
Dimo looked, then looked away. Months and months of avoiding his father’s recrimination did not mean he would not be recognized if he tried to pass through that mandala of decorative uselessness.
There was no help for it. He turned, away from the blaze of candles and lanterns and torchlight, past side streets likely to be full of celebrating relatives, and led the way deeper into the darkness.
He slowed as they rounded a corner and stepped over a crumbled pile of slates fallen from the roof of a townhouse in incremental collapse. This was not the place to be perceived as prey in flight. His chin came up, and his shoulders with it. The taps on the heels and toes of his boots clicked with each long stride, an easy, carefree camouflage at odds with the aggravation seething inside him.
Tayo’s quiet footfalls at his shoulder reminded him unhappily of the more usual traffic in this particular maze of mildewed avenues and alleys, parts of the city he knew Tayo did not want to see ever again. If they’d come in daylight--if they’d gotten back into town earlier, instead of having just gotten off their horses--they might have been sure to miss the whores and their clients.
Dimo sidestepped a thrashing in the deep shadows of a door niche. The young prostitute’s fine-boned dark face--mixed blood Sprite, likely--stretched upthrust and twisted in the moonlight, teeth in his lip, as the man behind him groaned with his climax. A quick inhalation was all the reaction Timotayo let slip.
Then the bells of the ancient cathedral rang out. Dimo swore, certain they’d forfeited any chance of reaching Reeslan’s message-taker tonight. The bells continued, however, to peal their announcement of the departure of the newlyweds for their marriage bed uptown, and Dimo lurched into motion as urgency once more dug in its spurs. The one-legged beggar’s corner was in the direct path of the wedding party. They could still reach him, but would have to hurry to get there before he was run off by wedding guards.
"Keep left," Tayo muttered, husky voice strained, as they put the whore behind them. "There’s a crowd in the alley."
"Let’s hope they’re too busy to notice us."
Tayo’s soft snort faded as two figures slipped around the next corner, headed toward them. The boy, another Sprite crossbreed, held a shielded lantern out to guide his client. The cavalier’s hand draped possessively across the boy’s dark neck. Dimo clenched his teeth as the play of lamplight dragged him from observer to player. He did not have time for a ritual exchange of insults.
The prostitute jerked to a stop, eyes wide. He tried to lead to the left, but his unidentified highborn client paused. A cone of light from the top of the lantern picked out the cavalier’s sneer and all the visual clues that defined his social class: the bright beauty of his clothes, the cascade of long, loose hair over his shoulders, the dainty jeweled hilt of a sword at his side. Dimo let hauteur curl his lip, knowing himself seen and identified, if only by those same clues.
From the alley came a shriek of metal grating on metal. Dimo winced at the flood of light. His pulse quickened to thunder in his ear as he counted the men slipping from the alley and saw the truncheons in their hands.
The Watch rarely came this far into the warrens of the poor--one of the reasons Dimo had chosen this route. All the ways in which his and Tayo’s most recent bit of chicanery might still go wrong danced before Dimo’s eyes, making rude gestures. He squared his shoulders and tried for nonchalance.
A slope-shouldered figure pushed into the lantern’s circle of light. Dimo scowled as his sense of something wrong bore fruit. The man did indeed carry a club, but there the similarity stopped. Homespun took the place of pressed black tunic and trousers. Limp hair straggled across the man’s bony face. A knife glinted from his waistband and, in the shadows, from those of his fellows. Brigands. Odd to find them in such large numbers; skull-breakers like these were as likely to prey on one another as on unlucky commoners.
Dimo suppressed a sigh of mingled irritation and relief. No doubt they’d back off once they realized the rank of those they’d trapped. His fingertips sought the reassurance of his rapier’s hilt.
The brigands’ leader snapped a glare up at him. Dimo’s teeth came together with a click as a different sort of anxiety tugged on his nerves. No, they weren’t going to back off, and they weren’t targeting two cavaliers by mistake. This was a lot more serious than he’d thought. Aware just how badly he and Tayo were outnumbered, Dimo eased his hand away from the sword.
The weasel-faced ruffian grinned. He glanced at Tayo, standing like a good bodyguard at Dimo’s right shoulder, before settling upon the unnamed cavalier and his whimpering rentboy.
"Good thing we happened along, young sir." The lamplight glinted on their accoster’s greasy cheeks as he smiled, highlighting gaps where teeth had been. "You might have met up with thieves, or some murdering Sprite out to slit your throat."
The halfbreed prostitute shrank in on himself, face going the color of old oatmeal, lips moving silently.
The cavalier paid no attention to the trembling boy pinned to his side. "I suppose you think I should pay you for your consideration," he snarled, snatching up the lamp and focusing it on the face of his accoster.
Dimo bit the inside of his cheek. The thugs had chosen their ground well. The buildings here were decrepit, their doors nailed shut by the procurers whose charges worked the area--and who would not profit if their clientele decided the area was too dangerous. Who, then, was behind this scheme?
The ruffian lifted his arm and laughed from within its shadow. "You don’t want your father to discover your blood on this street, my lord."
As if to drive the point home, someone behind the lantern jingled a fistful of chains. Tayo hissed at this doubling of the threat. He tugged Dimo’s sleeve. Jaw working, Dimo slid one foot backward.
The cavalier swayed as the boy struggled. The man behind the lantern laughed. Dimo slid another half-pace from the mob.
"And we’ll educate your boy there on the errors of his ways, too," the ruffian said. His cruel eyes glinted as he looked first over his shoulder, as if for approval, and then back toward the squirming youth. "Send him home as a warning for the rest of his sneaking tribe."
The errors of his ways. The phrase rang in Dimo’s memory like the sound of his father’s palm hitting his face. He bunched a fist against his thigh in the signal for Stop. Tayo ground out a curse.
Dimo drew himself to his full height and looked down his oh-so-aristocratic nose. "Followed by the Watch educating you and your fellows on the penalty for impersonation. Not to mention extortion."
The ruffian jerked around, squinting to make out Dimo’s face. "Careful what messes you tread in, pretty lord," he growled. "You wouldn’t want to soil your dainty fingers." He jerked his arm, and the shadows transformed themselves into more thugs, moving closer en route to blocking both ends of the street. "No one is going to tell the Watch anything."
The cavalier laughed, his bravado wearing thin as the brigands drew closer. "You mud-caked piece of dung! Do you think you can get away with murder? Slaughter each other as you see fit--you will anyway--but touch me, and I assure you-"
Dimo whirled and stepped out of the way. Thuds and a grunt marked Tayo’s handling of the men who’d thought to make a meal of them. Dimo pointed into the empty darkness of the street beyond.
"The Watch!"
Curses flew as the thugs jostled one another in making a getaway. The cavalier shouted for the imaginary Watch patrol. The prostitute bolted, jarring the arm of his former client. Lamplight bounced across cobbles and peeling clapboards.
"Damn your eyes, boy! Come back with my money!"
"Stand! Stand, you fools! The Watch never comes here!"
Dimo gripped Tayo’s forearm, avoiding the red-sheened knife in that fist, and the two of them loped off into the darkness.
#
Tayo paused on the landing, tensed for the explosion he knew was coming. He hung the lantern on its stand by the door as Dimo yanked his dusty, sweat-smeared shirt over his head. Buttons scattered across the bare floorboards of their sitting room.
Wadded into a ball, the shirt landed on a chair just inside the door of their apartment. Dimo’s sword belt followed. Tayo let it clatter to the floor; they’d chosen these rooms, tucked in amongst the attic storage two floors above the chambers of the old dame from whom they rented, more for isolation than for price. They were her only boarders.
"A bath," Dimo growled, turning toward the doorway between inner and outer chambers. "I need a bath." His arm swept aside the woven tree hanging in the doorway, crushing green-gold-red against the wall as he passed into the dark room beyond.
Securing the door behind him, Tayo glared at the collection of stuffed and carved birds gathered on the mantel as he picked up the sword belt. The birds’ eyes glittered. They tracked his progress across the room.
After the near-fiasco of the evening before, they’d ridden across the countryside until the moon failed them, then holed up in someone’s stock barn for a few hours’ sleep. The milk maid’s shriek had sent them packing again. Guaymarien had appeared on the horizon at midmorning, and by dusk they were inside the gates and leaving their drooping horses at the stable they’d borrowed them from.
The encounter with the whores and brigands had roused Tayo from his exhaustion, but that rush of energy was long since faded; he didn’t have the surfeit of anger that Dimo rode. Being regarded as a tool, liable to be discarded when no longer useful, didn’t sting his pride the way it did Dimo’s. All he had left was guilt and sadness. Sadness, that there would always be boys and girls selling their bodies because they lacked any other currency.
Guilt for...oh, for so many things. At the moment, it was mostly a residual sour taste for his own days on those streets, and Dimo’s awareness of his flinch away from the teenage whore and the memories that were its source.
At least they’d beaten the wedding party to the corner where the blind beggar squatted. The old fool had smiled and nodded as their centavos--one of them lumpy with Dimo’s wax-covered message--rattled into the alms basket alongside his good leg. On the way home, the cook at the Goldfish had sold them savory pies and a bottle of wine. They should be celebrating their first night back in a week. But Dimo had worked himself into a froth over something, and he had never been one to let go of a good reason for a bad mood.
Tayo set the pies on a table near the window, then scowled at the birds’ mocking cheerfulness. "The fellow doing all the threatening was the bastard who usually stands on the cathedral steps, shouting about sin and fornication." He slipped the sword belt over its peg on the wall. "What the hell was he doing in that pisshole?"
"Someone’s found him and his friends a way to nurse their grievances." Like the birds, Dimo’s wide shoulders and lean-muscled chest gleamed as he slammed once more through the door hanging, grabbed up his shirt, and vanished again. Rough use drew a squealed objection from the pump in their bathing closet. "A clever racket, that. Swagger a little, flash some steel, and the cavaliers cough up their pocket change. If threats don’t work, you follow the lordlings home and ruin their marriage prospects. It’s all very well to have a taste for boys, as long as you don’t bring it home with you."
Tayo stared in the direction of the doorway. He shivered a little at Dimo’s savage scorn for the aristocracy he’d been born to and then rejected by. Tayo knew all too well where he fell in that strata. "None of them followed us as far as the beggar, that I can promise. As for the rest...."
The pump stopped its howling. "One of them followed us?"
"We lost him between the second detour and the third." Tayo folded his arms on his chest.
"Of course we did." The reassurance was automatic; Dimo’s mind was clearly elsewhere.
After a moment, whatever thought Dimo had tripped over had been catalogued and set aside. He stuck his head past the tree. One bare calf and a delicately-boned ankle showed beneath its ever-reaching fringe of roots. Netted branch shadows, strewn and stretched across pale flesh, reduced the rest of his body to sculpture.
"And, as for the rest, I apologize. I should be--I am grateful I don’t have to worry about bringing anyone home to Father. And I am not questioning whether they followed us. I trust you to stop them. I’m surprised the idiots came up with the idea, actually."
Tayo snorted. He tugged the laces at his throat loose and pulled off his own shirt. A thin red tracery decorated the bulge of his bicep. He fingered the blood and the shallow slice that was its source.
A guttural syllable drew his head up in time to watch Dimo cross the room, lips pursed. The arch of the younger man’s ribcage could have been no more perfect.
"They were faster than I thought." Dimo’s fingertips felt cool on the edge of the abrasion.
"It’s just a scratch." Tayo caught his breath as Dimo squeezed the cut, then lowered his mouth to the wound and licked it clean. The weight of Dimo’s sheaf of auburn hair against his arm felt like home.
Dimo tipped his head to the side. Tayo drank in the laughter buried in eyes the mossy green of deep water. "Next time, I’ll be certain to insult our assailants sooner."
"What, and miss the opportunity to hear them tell you what a pretty boy you are, you arrogant popinjay?" Tayo managed to keep his tone light despite the warmth flooding up from his groin.
"Imagine, he thought that would upset me." Long fingers stiffened and splayed, Dimo cocked his head to one side. The fan he mimed slid past his face with an agonizing slowness that made Tayo’s heart pound in time to the appearance-disappearance-reappearance of green eyes. A wicked grin showed every tooth.
Tayo felt his depression lift. The memories called up by a return after ten years to the place of his degradation were just that, memories, ghosts to haunt him only if he let them. The man he was had come far from that miserable boy. Losing sight of that could cost him all he had--partnership, security, the respect of someone who mattered. He would leave those ghosts where they belonged, and trust Dimo’s subtle mind to untangle the rest of the night’s puzzles.
He put his hand on his companion’s warm, bare back and gave him a gentle shove toward the tree. "Your bath awaits, sirrah."
Three
Tayo jerked awake as knocking rattled the door to their apartment. Light from the sitting room window clung to the edges of the suspended tree; the day was well begun. In the dim cave of the bedroom, though, all he could pick out was the padded lump that was Dimo, one pale leg flung outside the blankets he’d appropriated after being thoroughly distracted from his worries.
Bastard. But he smiled as he thought it.
The rapping came again. "Up, lazeabouts!"
With a sigh Tayo slid off the bed. He made it to the door before Belinda, the herbalist from whom they rented these rooms, could toss any further slurs his way. The scents of cinnamon and cloves swirled in the air of the hallway, reminding him of mulled wine. Belinda crooked a grudging smile at the trousers he’d dragged on. He hadn’t had time to try lacing them, which was as well, given that they were made for a taller, leaner body than his. The flap gaped suggestively.
"Good morning, Señora. The master’s not up yet."
The old dame scowled. Her fingers picked scraps of ground bark from the apron covering her gown. Smears of blood were darkening one side of the fabric. "I’ve had no fewer than three messages for your young Master already this morning, Timotayo. Fortunately, I was already up and working." She handed over the folded notes, their wax seals intact, releasing them as if they might bite. "That one just came."
Tayo stared at a scorched "urgent" spot on the uppermost note. Frustration tightened his shoulders. He didn’t have to be able to read to understand there was trouble if their message to Reeslan had gathered such a rapid response. Dimo, damn him, had been right to be on edge the night before. "Will you wait for coin for the messages?"
Belinda snorted and turned away. Graying dark hair, spilled from its bun, lay on her shoulders like lace. "The young lord’s good for it; he can owe me. I’ve a broken arm and bruised ribs to treat, and if I don’t get back downstairs the girl’s likely to bolt without finishing the tisane I made for her. I don’t understand why these Sprite halfbreeds think they’ll be safer here," she added, exasperated.
Tayo shut the door behind him, balling his fist until the parchment summonses lying in his palm crinkled their objections. Turning, he found Dimo walking toward the window in their cramped sitting room, doing up the buttons on his shirt. This one was muslin white as a señorita’s throat, and the molten wash of unbound hair across it brought Tayo’s forward motion to a halt.
Those sensuous lips cocked a crooked smile. One dark red eyebrow flicked upwards. "Ah, Tayo. Ever the clotheshorse, you are."
Tayo scowled at him. Ignoring Dimo’s fastidious disapproval, Tayo stepped out of the borrowed trousers and left them in a heap on the floor. He held out his hand, exposing the topmost note to the sunlight. The undistinguished blob of wax sealing it lay creamy pale against the darker scrap of old parchment. The charred mark winked up at him, feigning innocence, but Tayo knew better. Breath huffed from his nostrils.
"What does he want from us now?"
Dimo had paused in the process of collecting his hair over one shoulder. His tongue touched his lower lip. The sharp angles of his face pinched inward as he plucked the parchment bits from Tayo’s hand, popping the wax seal from the first note and holding it open so Tayo could see that the only message it had contained was the charred mark. "I hope he plans to explain why he arranged to have his little trick discovered before I’d gotten myself out of the room and away."
"Do you think that likely?" Tayo tried for the same sort of indifference that Dimo drew on like a cloak, knowing full well Dimo read his nervousness as clearly as if he’d spoken it.
Dimo scowled as he plucked the second note’s seal loose. It, too, was blank. He let it drop to the floor, where it came to rest against his bare foot. "Not very. I expect last night’s mess has sparked some talk. It was no accident that those halfwits cornered men they assumed could be blackmailed, and I think they would cheerfully have gutted us if we hadn’t shown them our teeth. He’ll want to know what happened, and why."
Tayo flexed his left arm. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d been called to task for killing someone. "I only defended myself." The specter of last night’s guilt gibbered in the corner of his vision.
Dimo’s long fingers touched his jaw, fingertips rasping against dark skin and darker beard hairs. "My dear little bull. You’ll let me take at least a bit of the credit, won’t you?"
Tayo studied those deep eyes, the laugh lines that bracketed them, and the tiny jagged scar on one cheek.
He tapped one forefinger against Dimo’s lips. "Consider carefully what you take responsibility for."
Dimo laughed. "I’ve considered." With a little pressure, the seal on the earliest note cracked across its middle. Dimo thumbed the upper edge to one side. He opened his mouth to make some further comment, then paused as a scrap of linen fluttered toward the floor, a rose in blue and cream and gold--the embroidered representation of the Blue Rose tavern.
Neither of them moved to scoop it from the air. Tayo felt his muscles sag with a weariness that had nothing to do with how poorly he’d slept the night before. The Rose lay an easy stroll from the Orator’s Guildhall, an odd-hours haunt of masters and apprentices alike. The tavern’s thick walls held too many memories, all of them bittersweet.
Reeslan’s summonses were not to be ignored, however, not even by men no longer oath-bound to obey. Certainly not by men who’d trodden in something deeper than they’d bargained for.
"Well," Dimo said in a tone heavy with sarcasm. "Won’t they be surprised to see us?"
sfwa); what it is becoming will be more apparent, I think, tomorrow when more people have posted. At any rate, participating in this bit of sociological experimentation is fun. *g*I'm posting tonight because my Mondays tend to be hellish. So, herewith find the first three chapters of the novel I'm currently using to troll for agents, the story called Cavalier Attitude. Allow me to introduce Dimo Avrila:
One
Dimolacan Avrila clung to the shutters and listened to the argument (many feet, and at least three voices) working its way up the stairs.
Weight balanced between the right-most shutter bracket and the slender line he’d climbed to reach this point, Dimo closed his eyes, the better to focus on what was being said, and scowled. It would have been nice if Reeslan had warned him how quickly the signet he'd just planted amongst the lady's other tokens of alliance would be “discovered.”
"But, my lord, what makes you think we would bring him into our circle?" A pretty voice, that, and well practiced; she made it sound as if she believed herself.
"Let’s just say, I have my sources." That one was smug rather than pretty. Dimo did not recall hearing the man’s voice before.
He did, unfortunately, recognize the sardonic laughter that followed. "A source with black skin and sharp little teeth, no doubt. And you believed your source, Feria. For shame."
A moment’s silence conveyed Feria’s shrug. "I’m happy to be proved wrong, Basilio. All the lady needs to do is show us that she hasn’t got the thing."
"But, my lord," she tried again, in a higher octave.
"I don’t care if she does have it," Basilio said, stomping over her whining as he stomped over everything else. "It’s time and past time for someone to step up and demand the king account for his behavior."
Laughter washed over Basilio’s sharp tones. "Someone, but just not you, eh, Basilio?"
Basilio snorted. Dimo’s lips pinched tight as he remembered the last time he’d been face to face with cousin Basilio and had to endure Basilio’s sneering certainty of his place in the galaxy of Guaymarien’s blooded families.
"I don’t really care whether Basilio’s grown a spine or not," Feria said. "What I care about is the penalty for treason, and whether someone here is guilty of soliciting me to commit it, and I have yet to hear any of you tell me why I shouldn’t be concerned."
"Treason!"
The wail echoed across the villa’s lovely garden and the parkland beyond. Dimo winced, then stayed as still as he knew how to be as the senora’s guards tromped past below the toes of his boots. A wind rippled the hood that covered his head and swathed his shoulders in sweat-inducing blackness--but he was not complaining over the discomfort. Reeslan’s little oversight aside, he could not let Basilio and the other highborn party-goers identify him as the interloper. Orators Guild thieves were exempt from punishment if seized, but Dimo had no such protection; he gambled his life and Timotayo’s on this little chess move of Reeslan’s. If it came to that, Basilio would be certain to insist the punishment be carried out, and Dimo valued his hands.
"You don’t think it’s treason to collude with foreigners?" Feria said, ignoring his wailing hostess.
"You don’t think it’s treason if the king is?" Basilio countered.
"I haven’t yet seen or heard someone with real information tell me that Felíp is playing games with the Sprites," Feria replied. "All your bluster aside, Basilio, you’ve shown me nothing I can trust to support your contention that Felíp should be separated from the throne. Now, if you’d be so kind, Isabel: your jewel box."
The cabinet door Dimo had been at such pains to open without damaging its little lock slammed open; the wood cracked as it was flung against the wall. The perfume bottles on the shelf above the jewel box rattled and chimed.
"There," the lady said, tears in her voice if not in her eyes. "Look if you must, my lord, but I insist-"
The argument came to a crashing halt, and then picked up again at an even greater volume.
"What is that doing in there!"
"I’d say my theory just grew legs."
"Someone," Basilio rumbled, "has put this here to implicate poor Isabel-"
"And you, and everyone else downstairs who was chattering earlier about how terrible it was what the king was doing, and shouldn’t we be doing something," Feria broke in. "Whether it got there as you say, or as I suspect, doesn’t really matter. I can read manipulation as well as the next man. Good evening, gentlemen, señora."
Dimo bit his lip and enjoyed, vicariously, the string of oaths that punctuated his cousin’s failure. Then he drew a soft breath, for Basilio had stopped swearing.
"When was the last time you were in here--in this box?" He must have shaken the señora, because she cried out and then began to sob. Flesh met flesh, ungently. "Enough of that. Was the ring in the box when you put on these baubles tonight?"
Sniff. "N-no. No, I’m sure it wasn’t."
The window frame creaked. Basilio’s breath was loud, and close. "Then the sneak is probably still on the premises." He withdrew. "Call your guards. Have them search the place."
Dimo did not wait to hear more. He wrapped the thin cord around his wrist, then down the dark side of the building he went, praying that Tayo had the horses ready.
Two
A night and a day later, Dimo stood with Tayo on a corner deep in Guaymarien’s ancient, tattered heart, patting dust from his clothes and cursing under his breath. The light had all but faded from the sky; at the next striking of the city’s bells, the old beggar who collected messages for Reeslan would head home from his uptown corner. A day’s delay in reporting the completion of most taskings did not trouble Dimo. Tonight, however, he had a bone to pick with Kellan Reeslan, Guildmaster of diplomats and thieves, and a niggling suspicion that he needed to report in sooner than later. And, as luck would have it, their way was blocked.
Laughter and the sounds of drums and horns carried down the narrow street. Dimo waved Tayo back, away from a chance sighting of their faces. The shortest path to Reeslan’s message-taker lay through the plaza in front of the city’s holiest cathedral--and that same plaza brimmed tonight with well-dressed cavaliers and señoras in their best finery, come to the sacred shrine to celebrate a wedding, the culmination of ten years’ negotiation and waiting on the part of the bridegroom and an affirmance of Dimo’s cousins’ families’ places amongst the most powerful in and of the land.
Dimo looked, then looked away. Months and months of avoiding his father’s recrimination did not mean he would not be recognized if he tried to pass through that mandala of decorative uselessness.
There was no help for it. He turned, away from the blaze of candles and lanterns and torchlight, past side streets likely to be full of celebrating relatives, and led the way deeper into the darkness.
He slowed as they rounded a corner and stepped over a crumbled pile of slates fallen from the roof of a townhouse in incremental collapse. This was not the place to be perceived as prey in flight. His chin came up, and his shoulders with it. The taps on the heels and toes of his boots clicked with each long stride, an easy, carefree camouflage at odds with the aggravation seething inside him.
Tayo’s quiet footfalls at his shoulder reminded him unhappily of the more usual traffic in this particular maze of mildewed avenues and alleys, parts of the city he knew Tayo did not want to see ever again. If they’d come in daylight--if they’d gotten back into town earlier, instead of having just gotten off their horses--they might have been sure to miss the whores and their clients.
Dimo sidestepped a thrashing in the deep shadows of a door niche. The young prostitute’s fine-boned dark face--mixed blood Sprite, likely--stretched upthrust and twisted in the moonlight, teeth in his lip, as the man behind him groaned with his climax. A quick inhalation was all the reaction Timotayo let slip.
Then the bells of the ancient cathedral rang out. Dimo swore, certain they’d forfeited any chance of reaching Reeslan’s message-taker tonight. The bells continued, however, to peal their announcement of the departure of the newlyweds for their marriage bed uptown, and Dimo lurched into motion as urgency once more dug in its spurs. The one-legged beggar’s corner was in the direct path of the wedding party. They could still reach him, but would have to hurry to get there before he was run off by wedding guards.
"Keep left," Tayo muttered, husky voice strained, as they put the whore behind them. "There’s a crowd in the alley."
"Let’s hope they’re too busy to notice us."
Tayo’s soft snort faded as two figures slipped around the next corner, headed toward them. The boy, another Sprite crossbreed, held a shielded lantern out to guide his client. The cavalier’s hand draped possessively across the boy’s dark neck. Dimo clenched his teeth as the play of lamplight dragged him from observer to player. He did not have time for a ritual exchange of insults.
The prostitute jerked to a stop, eyes wide. He tried to lead to the left, but his unidentified highborn client paused. A cone of light from the top of the lantern picked out the cavalier’s sneer and all the visual clues that defined his social class: the bright beauty of his clothes, the cascade of long, loose hair over his shoulders, the dainty jeweled hilt of a sword at his side. Dimo let hauteur curl his lip, knowing himself seen and identified, if only by those same clues.
From the alley came a shriek of metal grating on metal. Dimo winced at the flood of light. His pulse quickened to thunder in his ear as he counted the men slipping from the alley and saw the truncheons in their hands.
The Watch rarely came this far into the warrens of the poor--one of the reasons Dimo had chosen this route. All the ways in which his and Tayo’s most recent bit of chicanery might still go wrong danced before Dimo’s eyes, making rude gestures. He squared his shoulders and tried for nonchalance.
A slope-shouldered figure pushed into the lantern’s circle of light. Dimo scowled as his sense of something wrong bore fruit. The man did indeed carry a club, but there the similarity stopped. Homespun took the place of pressed black tunic and trousers. Limp hair straggled across the man’s bony face. A knife glinted from his waistband and, in the shadows, from those of his fellows. Brigands. Odd to find them in such large numbers; skull-breakers like these were as likely to prey on one another as on unlucky commoners.
Dimo suppressed a sigh of mingled irritation and relief. No doubt they’d back off once they realized the rank of those they’d trapped. His fingertips sought the reassurance of his rapier’s hilt.
The brigands’ leader snapped a glare up at him. Dimo’s teeth came together with a click as a different sort of anxiety tugged on his nerves. No, they weren’t going to back off, and they weren’t targeting two cavaliers by mistake. This was a lot more serious than he’d thought. Aware just how badly he and Tayo were outnumbered, Dimo eased his hand away from the sword.
The weasel-faced ruffian grinned. He glanced at Tayo, standing like a good bodyguard at Dimo’s right shoulder, before settling upon the unnamed cavalier and his whimpering rentboy.
"Good thing we happened along, young sir." The lamplight glinted on their accoster’s greasy cheeks as he smiled, highlighting gaps where teeth had been. "You might have met up with thieves, or some murdering Sprite out to slit your throat."
The halfbreed prostitute shrank in on himself, face going the color of old oatmeal, lips moving silently.
The cavalier paid no attention to the trembling boy pinned to his side. "I suppose you think I should pay you for your consideration," he snarled, snatching up the lamp and focusing it on the face of his accoster.
Dimo bit the inside of his cheek. The thugs had chosen their ground well. The buildings here were decrepit, their doors nailed shut by the procurers whose charges worked the area--and who would not profit if their clientele decided the area was too dangerous. Who, then, was behind this scheme?
The ruffian lifted his arm and laughed from within its shadow. "You don’t want your father to discover your blood on this street, my lord."
As if to drive the point home, someone behind the lantern jingled a fistful of chains. Tayo hissed at this doubling of the threat. He tugged Dimo’s sleeve. Jaw working, Dimo slid one foot backward.
The cavalier swayed as the boy struggled. The man behind the lantern laughed. Dimo slid another half-pace from the mob.
"And we’ll educate your boy there on the errors of his ways, too," the ruffian said. His cruel eyes glinted as he looked first over his shoulder, as if for approval, and then back toward the squirming youth. "Send him home as a warning for the rest of his sneaking tribe."
The errors of his ways. The phrase rang in Dimo’s memory like the sound of his father’s palm hitting his face. He bunched a fist against his thigh in the signal for Stop. Tayo ground out a curse.
Dimo drew himself to his full height and looked down his oh-so-aristocratic nose. "Followed by the Watch educating you and your fellows on the penalty for impersonation. Not to mention extortion."
The ruffian jerked around, squinting to make out Dimo’s face. "Careful what messes you tread in, pretty lord," he growled. "You wouldn’t want to soil your dainty fingers." He jerked his arm, and the shadows transformed themselves into more thugs, moving closer en route to blocking both ends of the street. "No one is going to tell the Watch anything."
The cavalier laughed, his bravado wearing thin as the brigands drew closer. "You mud-caked piece of dung! Do you think you can get away with murder? Slaughter each other as you see fit--you will anyway--but touch me, and I assure you-"
Dimo whirled and stepped out of the way. Thuds and a grunt marked Tayo’s handling of the men who’d thought to make a meal of them. Dimo pointed into the empty darkness of the street beyond.
"The Watch!"
Curses flew as the thugs jostled one another in making a getaway. The cavalier shouted for the imaginary Watch patrol. The prostitute bolted, jarring the arm of his former client. Lamplight bounced across cobbles and peeling clapboards.
"Damn your eyes, boy! Come back with my money!"
"Stand! Stand, you fools! The Watch never comes here!"
Dimo gripped Tayo’s forearm, avoiding the red-sheened knife in that fist, and the two of them loped off into the darkness.
#
Tayo paused on the landing, tensed for the explosion he knew was coming. He hung the lantern on its stand by the door as Dimo yanked his dusty, sweat-smeared shirt over his head. Buttons scattered across the bare floorboards of their sitting room.
Wadded into a ball, the shirt landed on a chair just inside the door of their apartment. Dimo’s sword belt followed. Tayo let it clatter to the floor; they’d chosen these rooms, tucked in amongst the attic storage two floors above the chambers of the old dame from whom they rented, more for isolation than for price. They were her only boarders.
"A bath," Dimo growled, turning toward the doorway between inner and outer chambers. "I need a bath." His arm swept aside the woven tree hanging in the doorway, crushing green-gold-red against the wall as he passed into the dark room beyond.
Securing the door behind him, Tayo glared at the collection of stuffed and carved birds gathered on the mantel as he picked up the sword belt. The birds’ eyes glittered. They tracked his progress across the room.
After the near-fiasco of the evening before, they’d ridden across the countryside until the moon failed them, then holed up in someone’s stock barn for a few hours’ sleep. The milk maid’s shriek had sent them packing again. Guaymarien had appeared on the horizon at midmorning, and by dusk they were inside the gates and leaving their drooping horses at the stable they’d borrowed them from.
The encounter with the whores and brigands had roused Tayo from his exhaustion, but that rush of energy was long since faded; he didn’t have the surfeit of anger that Dimo rode. Being regarded as a tool, liable to be discarded when no longer useful, didn’t sting his pride the way it did Dimo’s. All he had left was guilt and sadness. Sadness, that there would always be boys and girls selling their bodies because they lacked any other currency.
Guilt for...oh, for so many things. At the moment, it was mostly a residual sour taste for his own days on those streets, and Dimo’s awareness of his flinch away from the teenage whore and the memories that were its source.
At least they’d beaten the wedding party to the corner where the blind beggar squatted. The old fool had smiled and nodded as their centavos--one of them lumpy with Dimo’s wax-covered message--rattled into the alms basket alongside his good leg. On the way home, the cook at the Goldfish had sold them savory pies and a bottle of wine. They should be celebrating their first night back in a week. But Dimo had worked himself into a froth over something, and he had never been one to let go of a good reason for a bad mood.
Tayo set the pies on a table near the window, then scowled at the birds’ mocking cheerfulness. "The fellow doing all the threatening was the bastard who usually stands on the cathedral steps, shouting about sin and fornication." He slipped the sword belt over its peg on the wall. "What the hell was he doing in that pisshole?"
"Someone’s found him and his friends a way to nurse their grievances." Like the birds, Dimo’s wide shoulders and lean-muscled chest gleamed as he slammed once more through the door hanging, grabbed up his shirt, and vanished again. Rough use drew a squealed objection from the pump in their bathing closet. "A clever racket, that. Swagger a little, flash some steel, and the cavaliers cough up their pocket change. If threats don’t work, you follow the lordlings home and ruin their marriage prospects. It’s all very well to have a taste for boys, as long as you don’t bring it home with you."
Tayo stared in the direction of the doorway. He shivered a little at Dimo’s savage scorn for the aristocracy he’d been born to and then rejected by. Tayo knew all too well where he fell in that strata. "None of them followed us as far as the beggar, that I can promise. As for the rest...."
The pump stopped its howling. "One of them followed us?"
"We lost him between the second detour and the third." Tayo folded his arms on his chest.
"Of course we did." The reassurance was automatic; Dimo’s mind was clearly elsewhere.
After a moment, whatever thought Dimo had tripped over had been catalogued and set aside. He stuck his head past the tree. One bare calf and a delicately-boned ankle showed beneath its ever-reaching fringe of roots. Netted branch shadows, strewn and stretched across pale flesh, reduced the rest of his body to sculpture.
"And, as for the rest, I apologize. I should be--I am grateful I don’t have to worry about bringing anyone home to Father. And I am not questioning whether they followed us. I trust you to stop them. I’m surprised the idiots came up with the idea, actually."
Tayo snorted. He tugged the laces at his throat loose and pulled off his own shirt. A thin red tracery decorated the bulge of his bicep. He fingered the blood and the shallow slice that was its source.
A guttural syllable drew his head up in time to watch Dimo cross the room, lips pursed. The arch of the younger man’s ribcage could have been no more perfect.
"They were faster than I thought." Dimo’s fingertips felt cool on the edge of the abrasion.
"It’s just a scratch." Tayo caught his breath as Dimo squeezed the cut, then lowered his mouth to the wound and licked it clean. The weight of Dimo’s sheaf of auburn hair against his arm felt like home.
Dimo tipped his head to the side. Tayo drank in the laughter buried in eyes the mossy green of deep water. "Next time, I’ll be certain to insult our assailants sooner."
"What, and miss the opportunity to hear them tell you what a pretty boy you are, you arrogant popinjay?" Tayo managed to keep his tone light despite the warmth flooding up from his groin.
"Imagine, he thought that would upset me." Long fingers stiffened and splayed, Dimo cocked his head to one side. The fan he mimed slid past his face with an agonizing slowness that made Tayo’s heart pound in time to the appearance-disappearance-reappearance of green eyes. A wicked grin showed every tooth.
Tayo felt his depression lift. The memories called up by a return after ten years to the place of his degradation were just that, memories, ghosts to haunt him only if he let them. The man he was had come far from that miserable boy. Losing sight of that could cost him all he had--partnership, security, the respect of someone who mattered. He would leave those ghosts where they belonged, and trust Dimo’s subtle mind to untangle the rest of the night’s puzzles.
He put his hand on his companion’s warm, bare back and gave him a gentle shove toward the tree. "Your bath awaits, sirrah."
Three
Tayo jerked awake as knocking rattled the door to their apartment. Light from the sitting room window clung to the edges of the suspended tree; the day was well begun. In the dim cave of the bedroom, though, all he could pick out was the padded lump that was Dimo, one pale leg flung outside the blankets he’d appropriated after being thoroughly distracted from his worries.
Bastard. But he smiled as he thought it.
The rapping came again. "Up, lazeabouts!"
With a sigh Tayo slid off the bed. He made it to the door before Belinda, the herbalist from whom they rented these rooms, could toss any further slurs his way. The scents of cinnamon and cloves swirled in the air of the hallway, reminding him of mulled wine. Belinda crooked a grudging smile at the trousers he’d dragged on. He hadn’t had time to try lacing them, which was as well, given that they were made for a taller, leaner body than his. The flap gaped suggestively.
"Good morning, Señora. The master’s not up yet."
The old dame scowled. Her fingers picked scraps of ground bark from the apron covering her gown. Smears of blood were darkening one side of the fabric. "I’ve had no fewer than three messages for your young Master already this morning, Timotayo. Fortunately, I was already up and working." She handed over the folded notes, their wax seals intact, releasing them as if they might bite. "That one just came."
Tayo stared at a scorched "urgent" spot on the uppermost note. Frustration tightened his shoulders. He didn’t have to be able to read to understand there was trouble if their message to Reeslan had gathered such a rapid response. Dimo, damn him, had been right to be on edge the night before. "Will you wait for coin for the messages?"
Belinda snorted and turned away. Graying dark hair, spilled from its bun, lay on her shoulders like lace. "The young lord’s good for it; he can owe me. I’ve a broken arm and bruised ribs to treat, and if I don’t get back downstairs the girl’s likely to bolt without finishing the tisane I made for her. I don’t understand why these Sprite halfbreeds think they’ll be safer here," she added, exasperated.
Tayo shut the door behind him, balling his fist until the parchment summonses lying in his palm crinkled their objections. Turning, he found Dimo walking toward the window in their cramped sitting room, doing up the buttons on his shirt. This one was muslin white as a señorita’s throat, and the molten wash of unbound hair across it brought Tayo’s forward motion to a halt.
Those sensuous lips cocked a crooked smile. One dark red eyebrow flicked upwards. "Ah, Tayo. Ever the clotheshorse, you are."
Tayo scowled at him. Ignoring Dimo’s fastidious disapproval, Tayo stepped out of the borrowed trousers and left them in a heap on the floor. He held out his hand, exposing the topmost note to the sunlight. The undistinguished blob of wax sealing it lay creamy pale against the darker scrap of old parchment. The charred mark winked up at him, feigning innocence, but Tayo knew better. Breath huffed from his nostrils.
"What does he want from us now?"
Dimo had paused in the process of collecting his hair over one shoulder. His tongue touched his lower lip. The sharp angles of his face pinched inward as he plucked the parchment bits from Tayo’s hand, popping the wax seal from the first note and holding it open so Tayo could see that the only message it had contained was the charred mark. "I hope he plans to explain why he arranged to have his little trick discovered before I’d gotten myself out of the room and away."
"Do you think that likely?" Tayo tried for the same sort of indifference that Dimo drew on like a cloak, knowing full well Dimo read his nervousness as clearly as if he’d spoken it.
Dimo scowled as he plucked the second note’s seal loose. It, too, was blank. He let it drop to the floor, where it came to rest against his bare foot. "Not very. I expect last night’s mess has sparked some talk. It was no accident that those halfwits cornered men they assumed could be blackmailed, and I think they would cheerfully have gutted us if we hadn’t shown them our teeth. He’ll want to know what happened, and why."
Tayo flexed his left arm. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d been called to task for killing someone. "I only defended myself." The specter of last night’s guilt gibbered in the corner of his vision.
Dimo’s long fingers touched his jaw, fingertips rasping against dark skin and darker beard hairs. "My dear little bull. You’ll let me take at least a bit of the credit, won’t you?"
Tayo studied those deep eyes, the laugh lines that bracketed them, and the tiny jagged scar on one cheek.
He tapped one forefinger against Dimo’s lips. "Consider carefully what you take responsibility for."
Dimo laughed. "I’ve considered." With a little pressure, the seal on the earliest note cracked across its middle. Dimo thumbed the upper edge to one side. He opened his mouth to make some further comment, then paused as a scrap of linen fluttered toward the floor, a rose in blue and cream and gold--the embroidered representation of the Blue Rose tavern.
Neither of them moved to scoop it from the air. Tayo felt his muscles sag with a weariness that had nothing to do with how poorly he’d slept the night before. The Rose lay an easy stroll from the Orator’s Guildhall, an odd-hours haunt of masters and apprentices alike. The tavern’s thick walls held too many memories, all of them bittersweet.
Reeslan’s summonses were not to be ignored, however, not even by men no longer oath-bound to obey. Certainly not by men who’d trodden in something deeper than they’d bargained for.
"Well," Dimo said in a tone heavy with sarcasm. "Won’t they be surprised to see us?"
