Maledicte by Lane Robins

Author:Lane Robins
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780345500496
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2007-05-28T16:00:00+00:00

GILLY LOOKED OVER HIS SHOULDER, eliciting an exasperated sigh from Janus. “What are you expecting to see? The solicitor climbing free from the trunk? You’ll have us off the road.”

“Why did we bring it along?” Gilly said.

“Do you think Mal wanted it underfoot?” Janus said. “We’ll start with the docks. I wager Roach has his roots there. When I saw him, he was cleaning salt from his clothes. He’s a skinny thing and dark, taller than Mal, but not nearly so pretty.”

“I met a boy with that name some months ago,” Gilly said. “A would-be thief working in a tavern called the Horned Bull.”

Janus’s hands tensed so tightly around the edge of the seat that they seemed carved of alabaster. “You spoke to him?” His voice, as quietly knotted as his hands, made Gilly nervous.

“Not much,” Gilly said, trying to make that unaccountable anger disappear, feeling out his words in increments of Janus’s stiffening or loosening hands. “He offered to housebreak at DeGuerre’s for a fee. I turned him down.”

“Nothing else?”

“He mentioned you. Said you taught him to read. He doesn’t like you. Said you’d killed his girl. How are you going to get him to come to you?” Gilly said, clopping his tongue at the horses as they shied from a drunk staggering down the cobblestone streets.

Janus sighed. “He’s greedy and lazy and undoubtedly in need of coin. I expect he’s whoring somewhere, passing time and waiting for the solicitor to return.”

“You think him a whore?” Gilly could not reconcile the feral, defiant boy in the street outside the tavern with a pliant whore. “He seemed too thin for that.”

“They’re not all like your pretty one,” Janus said, “put in gilded rooms where they eat sweets and wait for their men. The Relict whores are so different you might not even recognize them as human. They’re not.” The bitter edge to Janus’s voice kept Gilly silent.

“Mal fell ill once when we were children; I thought he would die. He couldn’t stop coughing and shivered so violently that I could barely hold him. Ella dosed him with enough Laudable to damn near drown him because his moaning and shaking was scaring away her customers, who couldn’t tell Relict fever from plague. I spent the night with him in my arms, curled beneath the bed, wondering if he was going to wake, and Ella spent the night fucking above us. One sailor after another. That was before she realized Mal was going to be beautiful. Then she cared. But I cared first, and Mal is mine.”

The whole speech was a near rasp, so choked with rage that Gilly felt it was Maledicte telling him this slice of nightmare. He drove on wordlessly; he barely knew how to soothe Maledicte; Janus was a mystery still.

Beside him, Janus’s ragged breathing steadied, but he didn’t speak again until they were at the Horned Bull. “Go see if Roach still works there.”

Gilly clambered off the bench and went inside. He nodded at the taverner and slipped into the kitchens.

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