CHAPTER SEVEN
The sun had come up, and the itch finally halted its ascent in the middle of her elbow.
Cima could only imagine how bad she looked when Ackles winced on seeing her, saying only, “Doctor. Now.”
At least it would add truth to their cover story. Cima wasn’t above celebrating that win, if only to distract herself from a long-dead portrait’s gaze and a very present bone deep irritation.
After nearly an hour at the doctor’s office, she reconsidered. If she stood up and ran full speed to ram her head into the doctor’s heavy shelves, it would do more good than the charlatan himself.
“There’s nothing I can do.” Doctor Naverr offered his services to the scavengers and sailors of Broadside, but even still he didn’t exactly welcome them—or at least Cima, with her odd injury. She’d dressed as nicely as she had for the bank, and that hadn’t bought her much more empathy. Perhaps she should have offered to pay a year’s worth of his services.
“I was cut,” Cima repeated patiently. “A few days ago.” The lie was necessary, as there wasn’t a mark to be seen on her palm. “And now it itches like I walked through spring blooming delweed and dug it under my skin.” She didn’t raise her voice at all, which should have earned her some sort of reward.
“I’m not sure what you want me to do, Cima.” The doctor’s voice was equally patient. Identically so. Good. She hoped she annoyed him as much as he did her. At least he didn’t use her single name, without a corresponding family modifier, with disgust. “There isn’t an injury for me to clean, never mind examine. I can give you a tincture to calm an itch, but it’s meant to ease the skin, not . . . your bones.” He did not infuse the last words with distaste, either, though she had noted a flash of it when she’s first spoken the sentiment earlier in this doomed visit.
“There has to be something.”
“You’re also not sleeping, you said. We all need sleep, most of us a great deal more than we give ourselves the opportunity for. It can have . . . interesting effects on the mind, which could cause the itching. I can give you a draught to ensure you sleep tonight.”
“Fine.” She endeavored not to let him hear the sulkiness she felt.
“Alternately . . .” He paused and stared over her head for a moment. “You know it wasn’t delweed, but it’s possible whatever cut you left trace material behind, which your skin then healed over. That could explain the lasting irritation. If you can bring me whatever caused the original insult to your hand, I’ll have a better chance of understanding how to treat it.”
The rightness of it, and of the ability to do something that might help, brightened her sullen thoughts, and she straightened her spine to sit straight. “Yes,” she replied, enough intensity in the single word that he must have heard it, as a smile flickered across his mouth.
“I was well across town when it happened, but I should be able to get it tonight.”
Once she could figure out what, in that chest, had caught her. And find a story to explain why she had access to whatever it was—hopefully it wouldn’t be relic-worthy in its fanciness. There had been some relatively plain things in the chest. Hadn’t there?
Perhaps seeing a flicker of doubt on her face, he nodded sharply and turned away. “I’ll still give you the draught, in case. And even if the office is locked when you’re back with the thing that injured you, there’s a pass through—it will drop through securely, and I’ll be able to start working it over first thing in the morning.”
He ensured she could write, gave her a piece of paper to provide details and identification of the piece, and briefly demonstrated how the clever contraption worked. Unfortunately she retained little of it, itching figuratively and literally to get across town and back to the—her—their treasure.
Though the Liddow beckoned, Cima couldn’t risk going there in daylight.
Instead she waited in their usual corner booth on the second floor of the Barren. The sparse crowd of early evening and the two taller backs to the benches gave a sense of privacy, no matter how dubious, as she drank slowly from an oversized tankard. Tempting as it might be to down it, and three more in rapid succession, what good would it do to be drunk, itchy, so tired her eyes hurt, and then still have to sneak back into a house full of priceless treasure deep in a forbidden district?
“Obviously zero good, and probably instead do a whole lot of harm,” she muttered into her drink. The vibrating sort of restlessness that came from being overtired and not at all drunk and also unattended sharpened, so she took her drink and walked the otherwise empty balcony row of the Barren’s middle floor.
Twenty or so people sat or lounged around the tables, chairs, and benches scattered around the ground floor, all members of the usual crowd. Mandiva served drinks and paced behind his bar, Kalli swerved between bodies and furniture with her usual grace, and Tem would either be in much later, or had found somewhere else to bless with his music for the evening.
Her crew should wrap up Ky’s job before deep night—they’d made a great deal of progress the night before, and even if they didn’t finish on the second day, they were under no obligation to go late two nights in a row. Especially as they had started earlier in the morning than any of them appreciated.
There was also the potential that Ky had sourced a second crew to join them, given Cima’s injury. A low potential, but she’d grasped at thinner straw.
After she’d paced a few times, she gave up on any chance of making the world conform to her preferences and took her tankard downstairs to the bar. Mandiva offered her a quick nod and tipped his head toward an empty table nestled in the far corner under the balcony. Not quite as private as the second-floor booths, but a better line of sight on the door and the illusion of company, which was all she really wanted until her friends returned.
As impatient as she was, she winced away from the noise of their return.
Gaudi threw the door open with so much force it wobbled. Not entirely uncommon, given its crooked state, but he usually had a better handle on his strength. Meesh strode in as though the door had been opened expressly for him, like he was a Councilor on parade, and he was . . . juggling?
The four objects spun too fast for Cima to identify from across the bar, though she squinted intensely in their direction. Meesh had juggled on and off for years—it made for a lovely distraction on the streets, and kept his clever hands occupied learning new skills—if not at quite such speed. They must have had a good day.
Ackles scanned the room, met Cima’s eyes, and veered in her direction, while Meesh continued onward to Mandiva and Terio paused to speak with Gaudi. Their heads bent close together, angled away from any chance at lipreading. That was enough for Cima to figure they’d decided to return their on-again-off-again physical relationship to “on.” Accordingly, she raised her eyebrows in silent sympathy as Ackles approached.
“Don’t get me started.” Ackles grunted as she dropped into the chair next to Cima, then leaned her head against the wall behind them. “Did the doctor help?”
She tipped her hand side to side. “Thinks he can do more if I bring him what cut me.”
“Oh.” With another grunt, this one verging into groan territory, Ackles elbowed her gently. “I’ll go with you.”
“Good.” Cima slid her tankard over to the other woman, awkward as she used her right hand to reach across her body, then glared briefly down at the complaining left hand in her lap. “Thank you.”
“This rotheaded little brat,” Ackles said then, more tired than heated, and Cima’s gaze lifted and fixed unerringly on Meesh.
Meesh shifted his juggling to one hand, while his other dropped a handful of shiny coin on the bar. Not discreet, not in the slightest.
“Why is he like this?” Cima asked with a sigh, even as Ackles grunted for a third, deeply put upon, time.
“He’s been showing off all day. We’re mostly finished on Ky’s job, but might be done entirely if we’d had you and him.”
“He didn’t work?” Surprised, Cima tore her focus from Meesh’s antics with Mandiva and turned back to Ackles.
“No, he worked.” Ackles shrugged her shoulder and shook her head, then summoned a grin. It was a little more tired than her usual, perhaps, but Cima could tell the expression was genuine. “Did flips and cartwheels and turnovers and arm-swinging through the place, without which I’m sure we would have gotten way more done. But at least it was fun to watch. When I didn’t want to kick him.”
That, of course, was more normal. Meesh didn’t set himself to annoying Ackles and Cima quite as much as he did, for instance, Terio, but he still brimmed with all the little brother energy Cima could imagine, with extra besides.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t there,” she said softly, but not quietly enough for Terio to miss as she and Gaudi approached.
“We don’t play around with injuries when we have a choice, Ci. How is it? Any better?”
Cima repeated the middling news and Terio dropped into the seat across from her sisters. Gaudi made a noise of agreement, then retreated to the bar as they all caught sight of the full tray of drinks Mandiva placed in front of Meesh.
“I got it, Kalli!” Which was a nice way for Gaudi to point out Meesh had no business carrying the tray and making a giant mess. Certainly not while Gaudi was around.
The two men jostled and laughed, but the drinks got to the table without spilling, and the evening took its usual direction, including three new, alarmingly terrible toasts from Gaudi, all of which allowed Cima to turn her mind off until it was time to leave.
“Getting late,” Ackles said, with a stretch that probably didn’t seem performative to anyone who didn’t know her well.
“You should definitely go home and get some sleep.” Terio focused pointedly on Cima. “We’re going to need you back sooner than later. Meesh is playing more than he’s working, and even Gaudi lifting entire walls isn’t going to keep us on track without you.”
Meesh immediately rattled off protests, but Gaudi shrugged and blushed a little. Strong as he was, even Gaudi couldn’t lift entire walls, so more than likely this was a rare compliment from Terio, and further evidence they’d decided to pick up their additional relationship.
“I’ll do my best,” Cima replied, ignoring Meesh’s litany.
“Did you see Rastanzi?” Terio asked, and Cima immediately lurched forward.
“I . . .” She’d forgotten, entirely, the other trip she’d meant to take while they were working. Cima turned her best pleading expression on Ackles. “Will you go for me? I have it all wrapped and ready and—”
“Cima,” Terio said warningly, but Cima doubled down on the big eyes and clasped hands until Ackles visibly teetered on the edge of giving in.
“Don’t look,” Meesh said, slamming down his tankard and using his arm to wipe his face, a gesture both necessary and one that hid the movement of his lips. “We have admirers across the way. Far corner.”
“Admirers, or someone sizing up how much money we have left given you’ve been flashing it all over?” Terio asked dryly, stretching and twisting her head on her neck without peering over her shoulder.
Cima made a point of scanning for Kalli, waved when she snagged the other woman’s gaze, and caught Meesh’s targets in the edge of her vision. Two strangers, slightly too well fed to be from Muckers or Ossington, doing an excellent job of not staring at her crew. Still, even her indirect glance revealed how they were positioned to maximize the view of her crew’s corner, how absorbed they seemed in the small pad on their table, though the motions of one man’s hand were small and repetitive. Suspicious but not definitive proof that it was some kind of cover to divert attention.
“If that’s the case, they’re probably hunting for a flushy target.” Cima wrinkled her nose at Meesh. “Or could be that he’s a new looker for Ky, or just in the mood for trouble . . . Ackles and I can head out together, split closer to Rastanzi’s. Meesh can go juggle and tumble and show off, and you two stroll arm-in-arm nearby.”
“I don’t need spotters,” Meesh said as he grabbed Cima’s warm, mostly-full drink.
“Fine, then you split off and come back together all sneaky like how you want. I’m not telling you the details of your job.” Cima rolled her eyes, but didn’t stick out her tongue the way she might have a decade ago. “And don’t get hissy at me, when you’re the one dropping coin all flash.”
Meesh snorted but busied himself chugging her drink instead of answering, which served as agreement from him.
Gaudi leaned over the table, his grin a shade brighter than the hint of concern in his tone indicated. “You two will be all right? We can all travel together a ways, see what pops up?”
“If we catch a tail, better to make it easier to melt away onesies-twosies,” Terio said after a mid-sized consideration. “And I’d like to know if it’s just the two of them watching or a bunch more. If it’s just two, we make them choose which of us to go after. If it’s a bunch . . . Well, I trust you all to make the calls you need to, based on their numbers.”
Cima kicked Meesh under the table so he wouldn’t snipe back, and her leg tangled with Ackles, who was doing the same. Meesh tapped their legs with his foot, and the three of them smiled at each other. Gaudi’s beamed at the three of them, though whether he guessed what had happened or was just pleased they were pleased was anyone’s guess.
Either way, it was the perfect note to break on.
The night took over the moldering remains of city once Cima slipped from the boundary of the Cavella neighborhood into the ragged edges of Liddow. Ky had told them different stories of Broadside’s history, many of which were reflected in various songs and declaimer’s tales recited on the corners on market days. None of them agreed on everything, or even most details, but a common thread featured the oldest quarters and what had come of them during or after the Cataclysm. Liddow had been full of the restless ghosts of the not quite dead, with the very ground likely to open under unwary feet. Hiane, the Terraces, and what became Ossington had held steady and caught refugees from water and land. Muckers had been washed away three or nine or nineteen times, until the drowned gods judged the district clean enough and let them rebuild. The Heights collapsed, but like Muckers, was eventually rebuilt. For much of the time after the Cataclysm, people had lived in Hiane, the Terraces, and Ossington, but in the last hundred years, growth had been steady. Mawal had been reclaimed, though whatever name it had had before had been lost, and it had been renamed in honor of one of the first Council members.
Cima had only a ragged memory of the last plague and the cull that followed, emptying large swaths of Broadside. It had ended with an unusually large number of orphans, and the protected residents of Hiane had done their best to help.
The Council and their fellow wealthy citizens had invested in the other quarters, and made gains against sickness. An enthusiasm for gloves went in and out of style, and mostly people enjoyed—or were encouraged to enjoy—remaining in their own neighborhoods where they shared all the same germs. The Arvyle Council member, tasked with the health and safety of his city, often spoke on meeting days about how well they’d managed, how the growing prosperity, the ability to catch sickness early and therefore minimize widespread plague deaths, had all resulted in the highest population Broadside had enjoyed since the Cataclysm.
The number of children Cima had seen in all quarters, most of whom had parents these days, indicated that growth would continue. And so the city, little by little, reclaimed abandoned parts of its old skin, stretching back against the edges and rebuilding them for modern times and modern needs.
The Liddow Quarter remained unimpressed and unwelcoming, but something nestled deep in Cima’s spine eased when she stopped circling the edges and stepped through into the Liddow’s unlit streets. No sign of anyone following her, blocks between her and the nearest Watch patrol, and she was tempted to run full out for her house. Who would see?
Caution and long experience won out, and she crept through the streets, pausing at corners, backtracking, employing more tricks than strictly necessary in order to remind her straining eagerness that she had tricks for a reason. Exhaustion and the constant irritating buzz of an unscratchable itch were no excuse to rush. Not when the consequences could be life-changing in a wide variety of completely unpleasant flavors.
Eventually, she made it to the side window of her house, the front door still piled with debris from the awning and the inside floor exactly as they’d left it. In that it appeared little different than any of the other tattered houses that leaned predominately upright on the street. They’d thrown dirt on it, as dust was harder to repaint with, but if anyone got close enough to notice that subterfuge, they were already in trouble.
The window still had three strands of hair draped where they’d left them, and her scalp tingled, knowing she’d be pulling a few more hairs to replace them when she left. She reassured herself twice that anticipation caused the tingle, not the pain in her arm. Necessary reassurance as the itch hadn’t yet climbed past her elbow and she wasn’t sure what she’d do if it became a full body issue.
Untruth. She was entirely sure—she would throw her sanity to the sea and run screaming through the city like the madwoman she’d once seen, lost to the nightmares in her head and unseeing of the ones that still walked the world.
The drop into the previously hidden basement was markedly more tolerable when she did it on purpose, and with a lit lantern to see the way. The door had not made a triumphant reappearance while they’d been gone. She really should ask Gaudi what he’d done with it, but she couldn’t stop to think about that now, so close to her target. Though the pearls were gone, there was still a faint glow around the chest, and surely that was what dragged her so irresistibly forward.
Another vertebrae’s worth of tension dissipated as she knelt in front of the open trunk, and she flexed both hands against her legs rather than dive directly into the heaped treasure. The center of her left palm throbbed, the skin between forefinger and thumb ached, and she licked her lips, doing her best to ignore it.
“One piece at a time. Gentle on the edges.” Saying the words aloud steadied her, and she pulled a ragged fold of dark fabric from her bag and laid it out to her side. It seemed wrong to put such priceless treasure flat on the stone floor—she’d never hear the end of it if she scratched something.
She plucked coins one at a time, skated the barest edge of her left fingers against their edges, and placed them in a careful pile on the fabric. The contrast wasn’t quite as rich as Ky’s black velvet had provided, but in her small lantern’s light they glimmered just as promisingly as the jewels they’d sold to the fence had. Maybe she should sketch them, so they had a record of all the pieces they’d found. Perhaps that would be enough to show the doctor, say she was cleaning a rich client’s house and her patron couldn’t know . . .
No time to sketch now, so she imprinted each shape and twist in her memory. While she couldn’t always remember what someone had said to her, memorizing a shape to draw later quieted her often too-busy thoughts. The treasure before her could not have made for a better subject, and she committed individual shapes to memory so she could catch up on drawing them later.
A dark silver cup studded with faceted gems seemed promising for its capability to slice thin skin, so she grabbed that next. Between one blink and the next she forgot she held it. In the space revealed beneath the cup lay half of a delicately worked version of the giant lizard in the portrait she’d studied the night before. This one was carved out of deep purples and blues, each gorgeously fashioned scale edged in shades of dark green. Porcelain, maybe? Her fingers twitched to stroke it, see what it was made of, but she hesitated. It might be fragile, and the last thing she wanted to do was break it by pulling it carelessly from the weight its front half remained buried under.
Oh no, how terrible, you have to keep picking up jewels, she thought as she chewed on her lip. Speaking aloud suddenly seemed wrong, and she needed to focus.
Yes, focus. Focus on finding what cut her, not the beautiful sculpture of an imaginary creature, just because it was pretty. Or because it reminded her of an equally beautiful picture she’d seen for a handful of minutes before packing it up to deposit with Ky.
She did her best, but she shifted to methodically clearing the treasure resting on the sculpture, and did a mostly thorough, precise job with it.
Until she threw the collection of small chain links she’d been carefully piling on her left palm into the air. No idea where they’d gone, beyond the faint clinks of metal landing nearby, because it didn’t matter.
It couldn’t matter, not when her heart had launched itself into the back of her throat, her left hand had been stabbed through, and her breath had lodged somewhere under her heart.
Something had moved.
Something had moved in the chest. Cima had registered it only out of the corner of her eye, because she’d been focusing on the smooth motion of the interwoven chains, but something decidedly not chain had also moved.
Five seconds. Ten. She could hear Ky’s chronometer making its steady clicks, counting the moments. Her heart settled enough that she could yank half a breath in, then after five more seconds, the rest. She breathed, out and in. Nothing else moved. Spider? Snake? Maybe something very small, which had bit her, and the swelling in her hand had covered the tiny punctures.
“All right, where—” Her words grated on her ears, hoarse and unwelcome in the room, and she snapped her mouth closed. Then, annoyed—the basement couldn’t be unwelcome to her, it was the house’s own fault she was here, after all—she cleared her throat and spoke again. “Where are you, little bugger, there’s a doctor who very much wants to meet—”
This time she stopped talking less because her brain worked against her and more because she noted a detail she’d missed in the thirty seconds she’d counted before.
The sculpture she somehow still had not managed to fully uncover had been the back end of a lizard, the edges of folded wings revealed, legs tucked under, sweet little tail curled around it.
Except now the tail was stretched out behind it.
And now, as she stared at it, frozen, the angled tip of that tail twitched.
Something had moved, and though her chest tensed as though she were about to scream, movement of her own remained well beyond her ability.
She couldn’t look away, either, which was good, because amidst the shish and shush of metal shifting came a smaller, decidedly disgusted noise.
The tail twitched again. A leg moved. A second one, scraping against the precious gems and metal around it.
A third and fourth, as the sculpture—the creature?—shoved out from under more of the hoard until it was fully revealed.
Tiny face, exquisitely formed—carved?—a rounded triangle with a two small horns. Pointed, curved, gleamingly white horns. Snarling muzzle, with tiny, curved, pointed teeth, also gleamingly white. The entirety of it could fit curled in her palm, though currently it was stretched to its full length, spreading wings longer than its body. Glaring at her.
“Are you done?” The voice was deep and vaguely male, and it took an embarrassingly long time for Cima’s brain to register, understand, and then stutter to the decision to reply.
“What?” The best she could manage, and even that more gasp than word.
“Looting. Picking. Bothering me. Are you done?”
The documents they’d discovered only streets away had been in an unrecognizable language. But this small sculpture-lizard spoke perfectly clearly, once she managed to get over the idea that it was speaking at all.
No, not a lizard. Drown it all with the gods, she knew exactly what it was.
Dragon.
Dragons weren’t real.
But here was one. Glaring at her. Hissing. Flaring its wings. Baring its teeth. Speaking.
Her hand throbbed, and the pain followed the exact pitch and pace of the dragon’s hiss.
Drowned gods and forgotten relics and bilge-bucketed shit in her mouth.
She’d been bitten by a dragon?