Queen of the Night (The Revanche Cycle Book 4) (16 page)

They stood to one side as the gang, grumbling under their breaths and shooting glares at Renata, ambled past them. As the glow of lantern light slipped out of sight at the far end of the street, the patrol turning a corner, their hooded companions crept out from the alleyway.

“Damn, old man,” Sykes said with a grin. “You’ve got some fire in your belly, don’t ya?”

Gallo shrugged. “Twenty years in charge of the papal guard. I still know how to put the fear of the Gardener into a wet-eared recruit when I have to. It’s all in the voice. Renata, you all right?”

Renata’s shoulders sagged. She shook her head.

“I’ve lived my entire life in Mirenze,” she said. “This…this isn’t my city, Gallo. My people are brave. Proud. Loyal. They don’t…they don’t
act
like this. At least, I didn’t think they did.”

Lydda threw a rough arm around Renata’s shoulder. “Aw, they’re afraid, that’s all. Seen it a thousand times, from here to the farthest corners of the map. Don’t matter where you come from or who raised you or what flag ya salute, it’s all the same. Fear changes a person. Never for the better. It makes…something less of you. Makes you willing to forget you walk on two legs and oughta be better than those who run on four.”

“Lodovico Marchetti did this.” Renata’s hands curled into frustrated fists. “He poisoned my home.”

“And the Imperials will sort him out soon enough,” Gallo said. “That’s not our fight. Let’s just find your fiancé and slip out of town before things get any worse.”

They made their way to the one place in Mirenze where things could never get worse: the Lower Eight. Trash blew across broken streets on gusts of cold, septic wind, the air thick with the stench of sewage. Once-grand houses, abandoned generations ago when Mirenze’s merchant princes fled up-city, now stood like rotting corpses with shattered windows and gaping roofs. Tinderboxes where squatters squeezed in like rats in a trap, glad for whatever shelter they could find.

“Haven’t been here in a dog’s age.” Lydda shook her head. “And it’s still a shithole. Nice to see some things never change.”

Renata looked up the street toward a warm and distant light. The wind carried the faint strains of mad, reeling lute song and the crash of breaking glass. “Where are we going?” she asked Sykes.

“Lydda and me are going right in there,” he said as they approached the sound. It was a bottom-barrel tavern with no words on the sign above the door, just a crudely painted picture of a bottle and a tankard. The air outside smelled of cheap cigar smoke.

“What if they see your faces?” Renata said.

“It’s the Lower Eight. Trust me, these people have more important things to worry about than scary foreigners. And we
do
kinda have a professional reputation around these parts. These folks know us.”

“And the rest of us?” Gallo asked.

“Are staying outside and out of sight. Half the people in this dive are on Aita’s payroll. Don’t need a repeat of what happened at the roadhouse. We’ll go in and fish for some information. If lover boy is in Aita’s grip—or dead—somebody’s bound to be boasting about it.”

While the bounty hunters went inside, Renata, Gallo, and Achille found shelter under the eaves of a burned-out house. They stood in the shadows of charred timbers, ash on their boots, and waited.

“Can we trust them?” Achille asked, the boy’s eyes fixed on the tavern’s fractured windows.

“Sykes and Lydda? Well, they’re not good people.” Gallo rubbed his chin. “Certainly not nice people. But I think they might be decent people, in the places where it counts. Sometimes that’s the best you can hope for.”

*     *     *

Wreaths of stale smoke wriggled through the raucous tavern like floating eels, hands clapping and boots stomping in time with the lute player on a low stage by the hearth fire. Sykes raised his dented tankard, a splash of chestnut ale spilling over his callused hand.

“To your health, then,” he said, clinking his drink against Lydda’s and the tankard of their new drinking companion, a squint-eyed man with a bushy beard and a face full of faded scars. The three huddled around a back-corner table, the safest spot in the room, having bullied the former occupants into finding a seat elsewhere.

“So I was saying,” Pietro went on, “you two just came a long way for a whole lotta nothin’. That Rossini bounty’s a lost cause. Aita got him all by herself.”

“‘Got’ as in…” Lydda’s question trailed off as she dragged a fingernail across her throat.

“Not yet, but he’s gonna wish he was dead, soon enough. Aita’s making big moves. You know her father’s old guard, his right-hand men? She wiped ’em all out, after making side deals with their crews.”

“
All
of them?” Sykes asked. “Gardener’s balls, that’s half our regular client list.”

“All of ’em. The ones Felix Rossini didn’t kill first, anyway. You ever see a wild animal get a taste for human blood? That’s Rossini, all right. Benito? Dead. Scolotti? Dead.”

“Wait.” Lydda put her tankard down. “Little-Hand Benito? Not a chance. Somebody’s selling stories.”

“It’s all true. A buddy of mine worked for him. He saw the whole thing. I guess he had Rossini dead to rights, and the one-eared bastard threw something on the ground and suddenly the whole room filled with smoke while daggers dropped out of his sleeves. Rossini stabbed him dead, cut down three of his guards, and vanished. Just like that.”

Sykes and Lydda shared a glance. Pietro looked back and forth between them, the scars on his forehead twitching.

“What, you two know something?”

“Nope.” Sykes raised his tankard to his lips. “Not a thing. So back to the story. Aita got her hands on Felix by herself?”

“Bushwhacked him, yeah. All I know is, she’s keeping him under lock and key while she sets up a big fancy party for her new friends. She’s still gotta prove she’s as scary as her old man was, and I figure that’s how she’s gonna do it: main event at the party’s gonna be the death of Felix Rossini, slow and nasty.”

“When’s this party supposed to happen?” Lydda asked.

Pietro shrugged. “Hell if I know. Ain’t like any of
us
are gonna get invitations. Big shots only.”

“Well,” Sykes said, looking to Lydda, “looks like we got here just a little too late. Guess that’s how the knucklebones roll.”

*     *     *

“Bad news and good news,” Sykes said to Renata, standing in the shadows of the burned-out building across the street. “Your man’s alive but not well. Aita’s got him and she’s going to make an object lesson out of him.”

The blood drained from Renata’s face.

“When?” she asked, her voice stammering. “Where?”

“The ‘where’ is probably her old man’s estate,” Lydda said. “One hell of a hard target, especially now that she’s rooted out the troublemakers and gotten Mirenze’s underworld on her side. The ‘when’ we don’t know yet.”

“I don’t see how any of that is ‘good news,’” Renata said.

“I didn’t get to that part yet,” Sykes told her. “See, most of the bottom feeders around here, they get their kit anywhere they can beg, borrow, or steal it. They’ll shank you with a knife forged for gutting fish or bash your brains in with a chair leg, doesn’t make any difference. Your beau, though, he’s been running around with some very specialized, very expensive gear. Most people wouldn’t know where to get their hands on that stuff.”

“But you do?” Renata said.

“The man’s got a very exclusive client list,” Lydda said, “and we happen to be on it. Let’s go pay him a visit.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Over Renata’s protests, that visit had to wait until morning. They were dead on their feet by the time they made it back to the docks, and even she couldn’t pretend she wasn’t sleep-fogged and lead-limbed. Zoe set them up with a couple of rooms at the Hen and Caber, whisking them out of sight and behind locked doors for a few hours’ rest.

Renata slept, but fitfully. She dreamed of the bandit camp where she and Hedy had been held hostage. Images of the big brass hourglass flitted through her restless mind, the one the bandits’ boss had made her hold every time they let Hedy loose on a scavenging trip. The stream of purple-black sand counting down the minutes to her death if Hedy didn’t come back for her.

Now she was the one in the wilds, desperately searching for a lead, a clue, anything that would bring her back to Felix before his time ran out. Every lost second another grain of sand.

She woke just before dawn.

It was early morning by the time she rallied the troops and set out into the streets, following Sykes. Now they breathed the rarefied air of the north side of Mirenze, where stucco walls topped with black iron spearheads coiled around lush and sprawling villas. No roving bands of
partigiani
here: the locals could afford their own private guards, stationed at the gates in bright liveries, to shelter them from the Imperial threat.

“Right around here,” Sykes said, waving for them to follow as he skirted a low brick wall. A garden lay on the other side, twists of ivy escaping over the bricks like a prisoner’s rope.

“Shouldn’t we try the front gate?” Gallo asked.

Sykes jumped, grabbed the rim of the wall, and hauled himself up, straddling the bricks like a horse. “If the sun’s up, he’s working in his garden. Besides, he
likes
it when we surprise him.”

“He only pretends to hate it,” Lydda added. While Sykes scaled the wall, she led the way to a low oaken door behind the garden. An iron hasp rattled, and Sykes let them in from the other side. Renata cast a dubious eye over a freshly trampled flower bed.

Voices, drifting down a pebbled path walled by cypress trees. “—I
know
you were working with him,” a woman demanded. “Tell me the truth, Leggieri.”

Eyes narrowed, Renata swept around the path, coming to a clearing at the heart of the garden. A man in a slouch-brimmed cap and a smock stood with his back to a block of marble on a wooden plinth, gripping a hammer and chisel like they were weapons of self-defense. The woman talking to him was older, her steel-wool hair pulled back in a tight knot.

Leggieri, on the edge of panic, looked from her to the new arrivals. Sykes threw open his arms as if to pull him into a bear hug. “Leggieri, my favorite artist. Are you busy? Don’t answer, I don’t care. I’d say we could come back later, but we can’t and we won’t. We’re under a little time pressure. Renata, Leggieri. Leggieri, Renata.”

The older woman’s eyes went wide. “Renata
Nicchi
?”

Renata stood her ground, uncertain. “That’s right. You have me at a disadvantage, signora…?”

“Sofia Marchetti,” she replied.

“And if the two of us seem perplexed,” Leggieri said, “it’s because you were supposed to be in enemy hands.”

“I’m making a career of disappointing people who say I’m
supposed
to be anything at all. Marchetti, as in the Banco Marchetti?”

“I am, but stay your hand. I’m no friend of our newly minted ‘duke.’ My disappointment of a son and Felix’s blushing bride formed an alliance; you’ve seen the results all around you. Felix and I are working together, secretly, to stop them both. We were, that is, until Felix didn’t turn up for our next rendezvous.”

Leggieri licked his lips, still clutching his tools as he glanced at Renata’s companions. “How did you people even
find
me?”

“Those smoke bombs you kitted Felix with,” Lydda said. “You tried to foist those things on
us
, remember? Kinda shocked they actually worked.”

“Well,” Leggieri said, “they mostly work.”

“Aita laid a trap,” Renata said. “She has Felix, and she’s going to kill him if we can’t find him in time.”

Leggieri held his hammer and chisel to his chest. “Then we are all in grave peril. If Aita finds out I was supplying Felix with weapons, there’s nowhere in the world I’ll be able to hide from her wrath. And as for Signora Marchetti, I doubt even her son will be able to save her life—if he cares to.”

Lydda snorted. “Relax. Fortunately for you two, sounds like Aita wants to save the serious torture for an audience. She ain’t gonna mess him up too badly before the main event, and he’ll keep his mouth shut ’til then. Course, after that, all bets are off. Put enough of a hurting on somebody, they’ll sell you their own mother to make the pain stop. Trust me, I know.”

Leggieri looked to the overcast sky, took a deep breath, and rested his tools on the plinth.

“Under the circumstances,” he said, “I think we should continue this discussion indoors, and behind a locked door or two.”

As they filed down the cellar steps and Leggieri kindled a lamp, Renata marveled at his workshop. The walls of weapons, the long tables covered in springs and metal flanges and schematics etched on foolscap. She stared at a rack of finely forged daggers, from needle-thin stilettos to knives with curved elk-antler hilts and vicious serrated blades. She tried to imagine Felix armed with the artist’s killing tools and couldn’t quite picture it. The Felix she’d known, the one who sent her away to save her from Basilio Grimaldi, had barely touched a weapon in his life.

Then again, when she’d left him, neither had she.

“Signore,” she said, catching Leggieri’s eye. “Have you been working with Felix long?”

“Long enough to call him a friend, signorina. My concern isn’t solely for my own well-being.”

“Has he—” She paused, searching for a question she wasn’t sure she wanted answered. She gestured to the knives. “Has he used these?”

Leggieri glanced down, uncertain for a moment, then met her gaze.

“He did his best, early on, to avoid taking lives. Aita…forced his hand.”

Of all the feelings Renata might have expected upon learning that her lover had taken up arms, a soft, quiet sense of relief wasn’t one of them. Yet it flooded her, easing some of her fear, and she understood why. She’d almost come to terms with the blood on her hands—poisoning the gang of bandits, her accidental murder of a crusading nobleman and the one-night war she’d waged against his followers—but she couldn’t shake the dread of reuniting with Felix and looking into his eyes. The fear that she’d be alien to him somehow, that the lives she’d taken had changed her in a way he wouldn’t be able to understand.