Petris found only two more dung pellets in the stall and carried them out just as the roachifers led their charge in the gate. “Just a moment, goodsirs,” Petry said, bowing. “And I will bring your supper.”
“I don’t think so,” one of them said. “Not with the filth you’ve got on you. We’ll have a nice fresh serving wench, and you can tell the Cook that — without touching our trays, understand?”
The Roachkeeper Extraordinary had already gone inside by that time; the roachifers led Magnificence into the stall. Petry wished blisters on their feet and hands and boils everywhere else as he carried the dung across the yard to the dungheap and jogged over to the kitchen door. Daggart came out of the inn, hitching up his belt and twirling a billet, just as one of the watchmen did every day. Petry ignored him. Cook was piling the trays with pannikins of sliced meat and gravy, bowls of deep-fried insects, boiled vegetables, and a whole loaf each of fresh bread, still steaming.
“So you’re finally here,” Cook said.
“Please, Cook, the roachifers want a serving wench instead of me…”
“I don’t wonder. Boys are always dirty,” Cook said. “Put anyone off their feed, the way you look and smell.” He sighed heavily. “I’ll have to fetch one of the girls…” He turned away, bellowing.
Petry pulled out the potion bottle and put two drops in each serving of meat, each serving of vegetables, and then, with great care, spat in them as well, and stirred them with a grubby finger. If they all sickened…it would not be counted his fault. The rest of the potion he poured into the jug of ale. He was across the yard, lifting a bundle of thorny sticks for Cook’s oven, when one of the girls came out, whining that she couldn’t possibly carry that many trays at once. Cook yelled, she yelled, and eventually another girl came out. They both carried trays to the stable.
It was well into the second watch when Petry finished the last of the supper pots, got his meager supper — no meat or gravy for him — and heard the kitchen latch snick to behind him. He sauntered across the yard to the wash house, biting hunks off his stale bread, and adding another curse to the pile of them he planned to topple on Cook’s head when he had enough money for a magician’s fee. From the stable, he heard snoring — at least two of the roachifers were sleeping soundly and perhaps the rest did not snore.
At the back of the wash house, he wiggled out the supposedly thief-proof window, having loosened the bars in advance, and moved silently along the alley wall to the end wall of the stable, then around to the back, where he found the serjeant and several watchmen waiting with an earthenware jug: the cuttlemite baited rag, the cord to lower it by, and a rope through the handle to lift the jug. Petry tied the rope around his waist.
Two men lifted him high enough to reach the edge of the roof. Petry shinnied over the edge and pulled himself onto the mismatched collection of warped boards, tiles, shingles, branches, and thornbush thatch that served now in place of the original roof. Herimar, always unwilling to spend a copper without need, insisted that his stable roof offered superior ventilation and was healthier for any beasts housed therein. Petry untied the rope from his waist and looped it around the board he’d pushed through the roof and tied in place for just this purpose.
Slowly, carefully, Petry crept forward, testing each separate unstable surface, wary of the slightest noise, which the roachifers below would surely hear if not adequately under the influence of the drug. Fortunately, the multiple glowspheres the guards had deployed against thieves gave sufficient light to outline the roof sections, and made it easier for him to keep from falling through.
Something rustled below. Petry put his eye to one of the many vacancies and looked down on the great roach, stirring restlessly in its stall. The silver scrollwork inlaid on its elegant elytra left bare the area where its rider would sit. The roach lifted its elytra, releasing the gauzy underwings, fluttering them, and a strange eldrich fragrance, heady and alluring, rose to Petry’s nostrils. And there, for the first time, Petry saw the glitter of something moving, something that must be the cuttlemites, gently grooming the great beast. He peered as far headward of the beast as he could. The long, sensitive antennae waved about, one almost reaching the roof.
Petry shifted the shingle nearest him — now he could see the liveried roachifers, sound asleep in the stalls on either side of the great roach. So the potion had worked, or apparently so. He slithered ungracefully down the slant of the roof, unlooped the rope from which hung the jar of cuttlemite bait, and pulled it up. After a dicey crawl back up the roof, he unplugged the jar, pulled out the bait-soaked rag already knotted to a cord, and sniffed it. He could detect nothing but a faint smell of roach, but the serjeant had sworn it would attract cuttlemites better than a roach itself.
He lowered it through the gap he’d made between two boards until it touched Magnificence of Malakendra’s back, right where the jockey would sit. The pronotum, the serjeant had said that was. Nerves had been cut, so the roach would not reflexively open its wings at the sensation of the jockey’s weight.
The roach’s antennae wiggled, but it did not react otherwise. Petry wondered if the roach could smell the bait, as well as its cuttlemites. He began counting, as instructed. At first he saw nothing, then a faint ripple, moving forward from the roach’s rear, and backward from its head, that must, he thought, be the cuttlemites. The cord began to cut into his hand as the cuttlemites crawled onto the rag. The lower end, above the rag, appeared frayed as cuttlemites climbed up it, as well, to get their palps on the bait. At last, and some unimportant number less than he’d been told to count, he had enough, and pulled the cord up, smoothly, not too fast.
The hardest part was getting the rag and its cuttlemites through the gap in the roof without letting them bump against it. Once they were out, he poked the rag back into the jar with a stick, coiled the cord on top of it, plugged the jar, and crawled back down the roof to the back stable wall, where he lowered the jar to the serjeant. When he landed in the alleyway, the serjeant and his men were already out in the street beyond; he made it back to the wash house with no alarms, and set the bars back in place before stretching out on the floor.
Next morning, he woke to shouts that mingled worry and anger, just as someone kicked open the wash- house door.
“No, he’s here!” That was one of the roachifers. “Sound asleep, too. Get up, roach-dung! Get out. We’re searching for evidence.”
“Evidence?” Something tickled in Petry’s hair and he was instantly sure it was a cuttlemite that would prove him guilty. He struggled not to scratch.
“Did you drug that swill you fed us last night?” the roachifer said, shaking his shoulder. “Couldn’t have tasted anything in that disgusting liquid they call ale around here—”
“Hold on there,” Herimar said. He was turning purple again, Petry noticed. “That’s an insult, sir. There’s nothing wrong with my ale. Brew it ourselves we do, best quality…”
“Out of dirty socks and chamberpots, by the way it tastes,” the roachifer said, still holding Petry. “If it wasn’t drugged, it was poison to start with. We’d none of us sleep on watch without—” The roachifer was eyeing the Duke’s Roachkeeper Extraordinary, who had slept in the inn’s best room, due his position.
“Let us consider all possibilities,” the Roachkeeper Extraordinary said. “Our host has not had the benefit of comparing his ale to that brewed by the Duke’s brewmaster, but though it is of course inferior to that served the Duke at his own table, I found it not undrinkable at all — intriguing, really, the hint of delunkin berries and just a touch of saltgrass.”
Herimar’s face went through several expressions and finally settled into a nervous grin that Petry judged related to the bulk of the Roachkeeper Extraordinary and his weaponry…and the fat wallet at his belt.
“This boy, now,” the Roachkeeper said. “Boy, did you bring the men their food last night, as always?”
“N-no,” Petry said. “They — the roachifers — asked to have a girl bring it—”
“Oh, did they!” The Roachkeeper Extraordinary shot his men a look of disdain. “A pretty one, did they specify that?”
“No, no,” one roachifer said. “This boy was hauling dung, is all, and we didn’t want his dirty fingers in our food. The lasses inside, they’re cleanly. And we were hungry and didn’t want to wait.”
“Did you water your charge before you ate?”
“Yes, Roachkeeper—” “Of course, Roachkeeper—”
“And where was the boy, when the serving girl brought you your supper?”
The roachifers didn’t know, but when all the servants were questioned, Cook’s evidence was conclusive: Petry had come to tell him the men wanted a serving girl that night; Cook had agreed the boy stank of roach dung, and sent him to get firewood for the morning’s baking. Cook had fetched Pecantia, who argued the job was too hard, and then Scyllinta to help her, and the two girls had come back after awhile, flushed and giggling…he had seen Petry carrying bundles of wood to the side of the oven.
“Did they…” The Roachkeeper Extraordinary eyed his men again, and they shuffled their feet. “Well, let the boy go, Jost. If anyone drugged your food, if you didn’t drop off on your own from drinking too much of Master
