The Virtu (19 page)

“Okay, then,” I said. “Let’s go.”

She led me back into the hall and then up the stairs. The third door on the left was open, and we went in. Green wallpaper with an ivy pattern. Nice little oil lamp in brass filigree. Thing that wasn’t a bed so much as a big sofa—daybeds, they call ‘em. More flash-looking than a sagging old mattress, and don’t encourage the tricks to stick around.

The blonde shut the door and said, not seductively or anything, just asking, “Tell me what you want.”

I didn’t laugh out loud, but it was a pretty near thing. What I
wanted?
I wasn’t going to find that here, or anywhere I knew of to go looking. Death’s one of them things where, once it’s happened, you can’t take it back or fix it. Less you’re into necromancy, and even then I been told it ain’t the same. Ain’t nothing ever the same, after death’s had a go at it.

So I told her what I’d come there for, which was what she was asking: “A hard fuck.”

She nodded. Most whores I’ve known have been pretty much okay with the idea of just doing business like it’s business. Saves them the bother of pretending it ain’t. “How hard?”

“Your madam said no bruises.”

“I don’t bruise easy,” she said and smiled at me.

Kethe, that just about undid me then and there. Little blonde whore smiles at me, and suddenly I felt like a vase somebody was trying to glue together, only I was more cracks than vase. And I think some of the pieces were just gone.

But I took a deep breath, let it out, said, “You don’t have to kiss me.”

“Okay,” she said. “You don’t have to say anything.” And she came in close—first time she’d got herself within arm’s reach of me—and started working on my shirt buttons. I don’t know how she knew to say that, except that she was good at her job, and I figure she wasn’t in that shabby, second-rate brothel for long after that. ‘Least I hope she moved herself up the scale, because she was wasted where she was. She didn’t even blink at the bruises.

Sex don’t have to be about love. Most times in my experience it ain’t. But it can be about all different kinds of need, and that little blonde girl knew that, and knew what I needed, and she let me slam her into that daybed until we were both panting like dogs and dripping with sweat. And things weren’t no better, but at least I wasn’t itching to get my fingers round Felix’s throat no more. I don’t know if she came or not. She didn’t fake it for me, and I was glad of that.

And then we got up and put ourselves back together and I paid her and left. And things weren’t better. Not one fucking bit.

If there’s anything worse than being stuck in a strange town where anybody who notices you might go trotting off to the dragoons to turn you in for murder or heresy, it’s being stuck in a strange town and sharing a room with somebody you ain’t on speaking terms with.

I mean, it wasn’t that me and Felix weren’t talking to each other at all. But I’d pissed him off so bad that he’d walked himself back behind this wall—I swear by all the powers sometimes I could practically fucking see it—and all I got was this kind of hard, bright version of him. He’d flirt with me, but he wouldn’t
talk
to me. And I didn’t know what to do with the flirting or how to deal with it or nothing. And he started riding me harder and harder about my grammar—and sounding more and more like Keeper the whole time. Keeper’d never got off my case about
isn’t
instead of
ain’t
, and
doesn’t
instead of
don’t
, and now here was Felix nagging at me every time I opened my mouth. He didn’t say outright that I should stop talking like street trash because it made him look bad, but he didn’t have to. And the worst part was, as we got into the tail end of a decad since we’d come off the
White Otter
and still no sign that we were going to stir out of Klepsydra before we got old and died, I couldn’t tell if it was because he was really still mad at me or because it was a game to pass the time. The one was as likely as the other.

And as to why we were still in Klepsydra—well, fucked if I know. With Felix not talking to me, I couldn’t get real answers from him when I asked, and after a couple days I just quit asking. I think what he was trying to do was find some way to not have to go through the southern duchies. Which I don’t blame him for, except for the part where we didn’t have a choice. At least he’d decided to believe me about how we didn’t want to go anywhere near Aigisthos, but he kept trying to finesse a way of not going as far south as we both knew we had to. He used the last of our money to buy two maps and a guidebook, and then he drew these spiderweb things on the maps and covered every blank bit of paper in the guidebook with diagrams and bits of what looked like poetry and all kinds of weird shit. Hocus stuff was my best guess.

If I’d thought I’d get any kind of an answer, I’d‘ve asked him why he was so set against the southern duchies. I mean, sure, they ain’t no nice place, and they believe some really fucked-up things, if the people in the Lower City who hail from there are anything to go by, but it wasn’t like we were planning to
live
there or something. But if I’d asked, he wouldn’t’ve told me, so I didn’t ask.

So there we were, a decad since we’d come into Klepsydra, still up in that room in the Pig-whistle that we could only maybe pay for, and that was if my luck with the cards was in the night before we had to settle. Or if we—meaning me—did some quick and dirty work among the local populace. And it might come to that, but I wasn’t going to do it until Felix actually came out and said that was what he wanted. He was the one had spent our money. He could fucking well be the one to figure out what to do about it.

Felix and his maps and his guidebook and the pen and ink he’d charmed out of the night clerk were all sprawled across the bed. I was in the chair by the window, looking out at the sky, which was hazy with heat. The humidity was like this giant hand, pushing me down in the chair. It made Felix’s hair even curlier. I knew that annoyed him, and I was glad of it, in this little spiteful petty sort of way, because short of going out and finding another whore, and maybe bringing her back and fucking her on top of his fucking maps, I wasn’t going to make a dent in him this side of doomsday.

And even if I’d had the money—and I could’ve got it quick enough if it’s really been what I wanted, I guess—another whore wasn’t what I needed The first one hadn’t helped with nothing. I was still dreaming about Ginevra and she was still dead.

So Felix was scratching away at his new idea, whatever the fuck it was and I was sitting and trying not to think about dead people, and that’s when somebody started hammering on the door like they were trying to bust it down.

Felix looked over at me and raised one eyebrow, and he didn’t need to say,
Aren’t you going to deal with that
? Because somehow it was all my job—the chambermaids, the laundry maids, the clerks and the hotel manager and the hotel manager’s fat little dog—just like if the Empire came knocking, it was going to be my job to sweet-talk the dragoons while Felix went out the window. I knew it, and I didn’t quite know how he’d done it, and yeah, since you ask, it pissed me off.

But I got up and limped over and opened the door.

Theokrita Gauthy, looking like a buffalo on the rampage, said, “
Where is he
?”

“Felix?” I said. “He’s right—”

“Not Felix! Florian! What have you done with my Florian?”

I just kind of gaped at her, and that was when Felix got up and came over. “What’s the matter, Theokrita?” he said, calm and nice and all flash with the vowels, like she’d just dropped by for tea or something.

But Mrs. Gauthy wasn’t having none of it. “Florian’s gone, that’s what’s the
matter
, and I want to know where he is.”

“I’m sure you do,” said Felix, “but we haven’t seen him.”

“Ha!”

“Theokrita, we—”

She turned on me, and I backed right the fuck out of her way. “You’ve had him twisted around your little finger since the moment he laid eyes on you. Don’t tell me you haven’t been encouraging him in his silly ideas and egging him on to run away from home and do something stupid and throw away all his chances.” She’d got me pinned in the corner, and I didn’t know what to do. I mean, if she’d had a knife or something, I knew what to do about that, but this was something else again.

“Theokrita,” Felix said, a lot less nice. “As I told you, we have not seen Florian. I take it from your somewhat incoherent remarks that he is missing?”

“He wasn’t in his room this morning, and Hetty said his bed hadn’t been slept in.”

“And you came to us?”

“Where else would he have gone?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea, but since he
didn’t
come here, it seems a question worth exploring, don’t you think?”

She looked at him suspiciously, and then back at me.

“Mrs. Gauthy, I swear by all the powers, I don’t know. I ain’t seen Florian since we left the
White Otter
.”

She looked at Felix, her eyebrows up. I realized after a second she hadn’t caught but maybe two words out of everything I’d said.

“He doesn’t know,” Felix said. “Any more than I do.”

“He wouldn’t have just run off,” Mrs. Gauthy said.

“Kids do,” I said, and Felix shot me a
shut up
look.

He said, “Theokrita, whatever has happened to Florian, it is not of our doing, and I am afraid we cannot help you find him. Surely your energies would be better spent elsewhere.”

At that—and any half-wit dog could’ve seen it coming, although apparently Felix didn’t—Mrs. Gauthy started crying.

She didn’t cry pretty, and I would’ve laid odds she was faking. And if it’d just been me, I would’ve let her cry, ‘cause if she was faking, she’d quit, and if she wasn’t, there wasn’t nothing I could do anyway. But Felix looked like somebody’d handed him a pissed-off baby gator, and he kind of fluttered at her, getting her to sit down and sending me off to fetch a cup of water. I wasn’t real happy about going, because I could see he’d say anything if it would just get her to stop fucking crying, and I mean, it wasn’t that I disagreed with him or nothing, but you don’t want to go letting people like that name their own terms. Gets you into more trouble than it gets you out of.

But I went and got the water, and by the time I got back, Felix had got Mrs. Gauthy calmed down, so she was sort of gulping instead of sobbing, and she drank the water—although she didn’t say thank you—and that was when Mr. Gauthy showed up to see if we’d kidnapped his wife along with his son. Seems Mrs. Gauthy had left him with the carriage while she came up to rescue Florian or whatever the fuck it was she’d had in mind.

Mr. Gauthy didn’t look much calmer than Mrs. Gauthy. Now, he at least believed Felix that we hadn’t snatched Florian—which I wasn’t sure Mrs. Gauthy did. But what Mr. Gauthy wanted was to put the whole problem in Felix’s lap, which I guess is one of them nasty side effects of getting people to practically worship you. Felix was looking pretty sour about it but then Mr. Gauthy said “anything we can do in return,” and Felix lit up like a beacon and said, “We can discuss payment once Florian is safely restored to you.”