He smiled and looked her in the eye. “How much of this place does Cutbill own?” he asked. He still wished to keep the master of thieves as far out of the job as he could manage, just as Cythera and Bikker had asked.
“That scrawny weevil? None,” she insisted.
“In truth?”
Elody sighed. “You know we’re not the finest house, nor the most lucrative. Truth be told, we’ve fallen on hard times, Malden. Cutbill could buy this place ten times over, doors, windows, coneys and all, and not feel the pinch. He never made so much as an offer. He steers clear of us because he doesn’t want to absorb our debts.”
Malden nodded understandingly. “I’m not sure if the people I’m looking for were ever clients of yours… or of any woman plying the trade. But perhaps you’ve heard tell of them.” That was the third great talent of the harlots: they heard things. Men were famous for talking in moments of extreme relaxation. The working girls tended to share the juicier bits of gossip they acquired with each other. Had the Burgrave himself a dark secret to hide, if he whispered it into the ear of his favored concubine at midnight, for certain it would be the small talk of streetwalkers in the Stink by midday.
“Let’s see what we can learn.” Elody offered him a hand to help him rise from his cushions and led him up the stairs to the private rooms, where the girls were getting ready.
Once there, he described the shifting tattoos on Cythera’s cheek to a girl who billed herself a Barbarian Princess (in truth, she was only tanned by the sun). While a trull twice his age coated her face with white lead to hide her wrinkles, he spoke of Bikker’s acid-spitting sword. A girl of fifteen put powder of belladonna in her eyes while he elocuted on Cythera’s ability to appear from thin air. When she was done, she looked as surprised as he’d been on the roof of the university, but she had no news to share with him.
It wasn’t until he reached Big Bess’s closet that he found what he was looking for. Bess was taller than Malden by a full head and broader through the shoulders. She wore a tight bodice that made her substantial bosom look as big as Castle Hill. Perversely enough, her specialty was for dwarves-the diminutive craftsmen liked their women sturdy, and far from home they would settle for Big Bess’s powerful frame. It seemed they weren’t the only ones.
“A bit wild, but a smooth talker, you say. Big sword over his shoulder, oh, aye.” Bess grunted. “He leaves his chain mail on when he ruts.” She rubbed red powder onto her cheeks to make them look permanently flushed, then smeared some between her breasts as well. “You say he’s called Bikker? Milles is the name he uses, but of course it’s not what they call him at home. He doesn’t come often, but when he does I make him pay for the full night because I know I’ll be bruised and no good for anyone else in the morning.”
“I imagine we’re speaking of the same man,” Malden told her. “Bess, do you know where he lives? Or at least where I might find him?”
“Are you going to kill him?” the trollop asked while gluing on a set of horsehair eyelashes. “Because I won’t have that on my conscience.”
“No, no,” Malden said. “Perish the thought. He owes me money.”
“Ah!” Bess exclaimed. “In that case-”
Chapter Thirty-Four
When the Seven Day Fire finally burned itself out, leaving nearly half the Free City in smoldering ruin, a great wave of religious mania ran through the people. Both Sadu and the Lady were exalted for stopping the fire, and their adherents carried their icons through the streets in endless processions. Zealots of the two faiths came to blows in the streets, and thus began a civil war that might have finished what the fire began. The Burgrave stepped in then, crushing the leadership of the Bloodgod’s mob with brutality and a lack of discrimination. When the bodies were cleared away, he declared the Lady the official tutelary of the city. In honor of this patron deity, he seized an entire neighborhood of houses where Sadu was the only god and had them pulled down. Every timber, every stick of furniture, was demolished and carted away. The people who had lived in those houses went to live with family members if they could, or to the streets if they must. The very ground where the houses had stood was cleared to bare soil, so no sign of the neighborhood would ever be found again.
Protests had been minimal. There were already plenty of martyrs with their heads on pikes up by Castle Hill, and even the most devout were loath to join their coreligionists there. Besides, the houses the Burgrave tore down had mostly been destroyed by the fire already. Yet the Burgrave’s intention was clear-he had demonstrated that the faith of the Bloodgod was no longer an accepted religion in the city. If he allowed it to be practiced at all it was strictly at his pleasure, and he could clamp down on it whenever he saw fit. He needed a monument to that intention, and the cleared ground would be the place for it.
A stone wall ten feet high had been constructed around the six acres thus reduced. There were no gates in that wall, nor any way to enter the ground inside once it was completed. All sign of human habitation was removed from what came to be known as the Ladypark. Plants and wild animals were allowed to flourish there unchecked. Rumors persisted-and were reinforced by the roars and howls that plagued the district by night-that the Burgrave had introduced some large predatory creatures to the preserve before sealing it up. It was well known that anyone who climbed over that wall, perhaps looking to steal fruit from the many trees inside the park or to poach some of the holy game, would never climb back out in one piece.
It was a dangerous place, and a sacred one. Which meant that the watch never bothered to guard it. Perfect for Malden’s needs.
The top of the wall surrounding the park made a narrow avenue winding through half of the Stink and all the way down to the common of Parkwall. Malden ran along its top, where an endless row of wrought-iron spearheads stuck up from the capstones. One slip and he’d be impaled, but Malden never slipped.
When he reached the end of the wall he squatted down and peered through the darkness. A sliver of moon lit the scene, while vapors of mist curled on the grass of the common where a few stray sheep slept on their feet. Beyond the Ladypark’s south wall a hundred yards of open ground surrounded a grand villa. Parkwall was known for its enclosed houses, which belonged to those citizens rich enough to afford mansions yet willing to live so far away from the crowded merchant neighborhood of the Golden Slope. This house was the largest of them all: a massive three story pile of white stone, busy with gables and flying buttresses. Its walls were pierced in a hundred places by broad windows of clear, smooth glass-expensive-and in the front by a twenty-foot-wide rose window of stained glass, worked with cabalistic symbols-ruinously expensive. It would look very much like a cathedral, Malden thought, had it possessed any spires.
Smaller outbuildings clustered the forecourt, while in back of the house was a broad and meticulously tended garden of topiary and fountains. The whole was surrounded not by a wall, but by a simple fence of iron bars, pointed at the top to discourage anyone from climbing over. The fence looked imposing, but Malden might have laughed at the security it provided (had he not been trying to stay quiet as a mouse). A boy, or even just a very thin man, could slip between those bars by turning sideways.
He was not a fool, of course. He knew whose house this was, and that the fence would be the least of its defenses. It belonged to Hazoth, the only sorcerer of real power in the Free City of Ness. Malden knew of the man by reputation. Growing up in the city, unruly children were often threatened with a visit from the sorcerer, and even some adults used his name as an oath. Though Hazoth was accepted as a leading citizen (the only prerequisite of that status being gold), he was a reclusive figure who only came out of his home for grand public occasions. Such a character naturally attracted his share of attention and superstition-a reputation that was worth a dozen walls and moats and palisades. Whether Hazoth was truly as powerful as the legends made him out to be, no thief with natural survival instincts would risk drawing the man’s attention.
Trespassing on the grounds of a sorcerer was reckoned a kind of self-slaughter. There was no telling what dread curse Hazoth might levy on a trespasser. He might turn your guts to water or make your eyes burst in their sockets with a simple wave of his hand. No doctor could heal that kind of injury, nor would any touch you for fear of suffering a like fate.
No, only a fool would bother Hazoth in his own home.
Even without the threat of magic, Malden had eyes in his head to see that there were armed guards patrolling the garden behind the house. They went with shining lanterns around the corners of the stables and the
