Bounty by Tansy Rayner Roberts

Author:Tansy Rayner Roberts [Roberts, Tansy Rayner]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-648-17414-1
Publisher: Tansy Rayner Roberts

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I emerged from his office with a spring in my step and a rattling purse. Squeezing actual coinage out of Claddius was an achievement in itself, but I’d also scored a whole day off of my very own. I’d forgotten what it was like to have time to myself.

Next, I went to visit my dealer. Gallicon hangs out in the Docks District (also the Market District, Pawn Shop District and Seedy Bar You Wouldn’t Take Your Grandmother To District). He owns a bar the size of a broom closet, with a shiny marble counter opening on to the street. There’s never any produce in sight, only Gallicon’s elbows propped on the clean counter as he watches the world go by.

“DV,” he croaked in a gravelly voice as I approached. “What’s your pleasure?”

“The good stuff, of course. What’s special today?”

He grinned at me with his disturbing mouth. Every second tooth was missing. “I wouldn’t trust just anyone with this, DV, but you’re a good girl. I think I can let you loose on it.” He vanished behind his bar. I heard a few gloppy noises. Gallicon emerged in a rush, hauling something large, white and flabby on to the pristine marble counter. It flopped winsomely on the hard surface, tentacles splayed.

“Squid!” Gallicon yelled proudly, as if identifying the gender of a firstborn baby.

“I can see that.” I leaned forward and sniffed. “Is it going to taste like it smells?”

Gallicon tapped his nose knowingly. “Maybe if you cook it hard and fast, kiddo. But if you work it slowly, the flavours will be beyond all previous experience.” He kissed his fingers extravagantly.

“If it’s so good, why aren’t you busy stewing it up for your wife and sixteen children?”

“I got another twelve just like it out the back,” he confessed.

I tossed him a heavy coin. “Wrap it. Throw in two dozen oysters.” I paused. “The oysters are good today, aren’t they?” I had been craving oysters since Dreadnought.

Gallicon kissed his fingers again. “Fat as pigs and fresh as newborn little daisies.”

“Make it three dozen.”

Ten minutes later and I was home, opening up the windows of my cozy attic room and letting the chopped squid simmer in spices on the top of my stove. Most people in upper floor apartments aren’t allowed any kind of cooking apparatus because of the whole setting-the-city-ablaze possibility, but my stove involves no naked flames. My mad Uncle Imago built it entirely out of clockwork. At least, I think it’s made of clockwork. I definitely hear whirring when I start it up.

I rinsed and swallowed several oysters before getting to work on the sauce. I had bought a bag full of Chiantrian fruits from a market stall on my way home and now busied myself pulping oranges, pale reds and yellowish greens before hacking my way into a coconut and draining the milk into a bowl. Whipped together with a slug of lionade (a sweet white liquor brewed in the back streets of Zibria), it made a satisfying sizzle when I poured it into the squid pot.

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