Maybe cut a hole and let the ignorance out. Her well-trained hand longs to test its keen edge on boy flesh. “And her knife has a freshly honed blade, Segno Stronzo and fellow backside orifices. Hot and out of patience, I set down my crate, drew my pearl-handled dagger, and brandished it around their closing half circle. “Though her backside is most fetching…” chimed in a pustule-afflicted companion. The Cavalieri Teschio will scrape you off the street and there’ll be none to pay your ransom.” “Best watch your step, Damizella Prune Face. The only way around them was an alley, much too long and steep a detour for a hot midday.Ī scrawny youth pointed his spiky chin at me while his gaggle of comrades formed up at his sides. Nothing appealed, except perhaps the baskets of plums-assuming the sun didn’t boil them before I got back.Ī clot of young men poking, shoving, and hurling the common challenges to true manhood blocked the turn from the Market Ring Road into Dispute Row. I turned into the Market Ring Road, jammed with tradesmen’s stalls displaying the wide variety of modest goods Cantagna’s growing prosperity could provide. Dispute Row housed a number of notaries and lawyers prosperous enough to abandon their old accommodations down in the Asylum Ring, but not yet of such status to afford the more comfortable chambers of the Merchants Ring or the Heights. Entirely illogical.įortunately, this morning I had to climb only as far as the Market Ring, the middlemost of Cantagna’s five concentric districts, where my three most prolific customers kept chambers on the same street. Yet I knew in my innermost heart that neither man was drowned, as if a living thread bound Teo and me. Though I’d watched intently, neither Teo nor the bound captive assassin he had rolled into the river ahead of him had reappeared. Last time I’d seen him, he was diving naked into the River Venia in the moonlight. And I believed that Teo’s dreams had leaked into mine, hinting at a past … and a role in the world … that even a year ago, I would have called mythological nonsense.Įvery morning I woke hoping he would show up to claim his little bag of silver-his share of the fee for the Chimera’s last venture. For another, powerful magic, though he lacked any understanding of it. For one, the ability to make a person believe everything that came out of his mouth. Teo embodied enough mysteries to fill a lifetime’s yearning. A long conversation with the young man I’d hauled out of the river half drowned three months ago would be the best remedy for the late-summer doldrums. But after two magical adventures that gave our city and its citizens a chance to flourish, scribing had me near dead from boredom. Best of all, it preserved my appearance as yet another resident of the Beggars Ring struggling to keep fed. Employment as a copyist for the city’s lawyers was honorable work and paid better than tavern service. Just one aggravation piled on another.Īlmost three months had gone since the Chimera’s last venture, and I’d come to think the Shadow Lord had reneged on his assurance that he’d use our services again. I carried a heavy crate packed with wills, contracts, invoices, and letters of charter to deliver to my clients before the proliferation of copied documents burst the walls of my shop. Il Padroné’s Regulations for Good Order forbade chamber pots being emptied in the Ring Roads or the Via Salita. The side lanes were no less crowded and their aroma even worse. The stink was inescapable, especially when every sticky, sweating citizen of Cantagna crammed the Via Salita, the straightest, thus steepest, road from the Beggars Ring to the Heights. The noisome airs of the lower city always reached their odious peak in the Month of Vines, just before the summer yielded to the ripe sweetness of the harvest.
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