A crowd had gathered. Neighbors and street merchants and whoever happened to be passing by. There was nothing like a crowd for drawing a crowd. Enen, the Kurtadam woman Marcus had hired as a guard when Cithrin first sent him out to build her branch, came out with a complex puppet cradled in her arms like a sleeping child. She laid it gently on the growing mound of things.
“How can you do this?” the Kurtadam man shouted at her. “How can you do this to one of your own kind?”
Enen ignored him and went back in. A Jasuru man—Hart, his name was—came out with a double handful of clothes. Silks and brocades, some of them. It wasn’t hard to see where the bank’s money had gone, but the collateral on the loan wasn’t tunics and hose. Wasn’t even the puppet works. It was rights to the house itself, and so now that the terms of default were in play, it was the house Marcus and his guards were taking. Yardem ducked out from under the low doorframe, a sewn mattress under his arm. The Kurtadam man burst into hopeless tears.
From the crowd, a man laughed and started making false crying sounds of his own.
“That’s the last of it, sir,” Yardem said. “We’ve started boarding it up. Making it secure.”
“Thank you,” Marcus said.
“Yes, sir.”
The Kurtadam man was sitting on his mattress with his head in his hands. Sobs racked his body. Marcus squatted down beside him.
“All right,” Marcus said. “So here’s what happens next. You’re going to be angry and you’re going to want to get back at us. Me, the bank, anyone. It’ll take a week, maybe more, to get past the worst of that, but in the meantime, you won’t be thinking things through. You’re going to tell yourself that burning the house is the right thing. If you can’t have it, no one can. Like that. Are you listening?”
“Eat shit,” the man said between sobs.
“I’ll take that for yes. So I’m going to leave some of my people here. They’ll be in the house and the street just to see to it that nothing interesting happens. If anyone comes into the house, they’ll kill them. If anyone tries to damage the house from the outside, they’ll hurt them badly. So don’t let’s dance that, all right?”
Maybe it was the gentleness of the threat, but the Kurtadam man stopped long enough to nod. That was a good sign, at least.
“I’m going to make you an offer now,” Marcus said. “I don’t mean any offense by it. It’s not the bank doing it, it’s me. You’ve got all this and no place for it. Your things are going to rot in the street. Won’t do you any good. I’ll give you thirty weight in silver for the whole thing, and you can walk away. Start over.”
The tears were falling from the man’s eyes, beading on his oily, otter-fine fur like dewdrops.
“Worth more,” he choked.
“Not lying on the street, it’s not,” Marcus said.
“I need my puppets. It’s how I live.”
“You can keep three of the puppets, then. Same price.”
Despair washed over the man’s expression as he looked at his chests and clothes, a great plaster vase with cut flowers wilting in it. The crowd looked on in amusement or false sympathy.
“I was going to pay,” the man said softly.
“You weren’t,” Marcus said. “And that’s all past now. Take your dolls and your silver, and go try again, all right?”
The man nodded. More tears. Marcus pressed a wallet with the silver into the man’s hand.
“All right, let’s load all this up except whichever three puppets he wants, and take it back to the warehouse.”
“Yes, sir,” Yardem said. “And after?”
“Bathhouse. I’m feeling a touch soiled.”
* * *
T
he summer in Porte Oliva was a bandit. It hid behind the soft sea breeze and the long, comfortable evenings. It spoke in the friendly and reassuring tones of surf and birdcall. If at midday the sun felt like a hand pushing down against his shoulder, Marcus could still call it companionable. The attack would come—blazing days and sweat-filled nights. The Kurtadam would shave themselves back almost to stubble. The Firstblood and the Cinnae would abandon modesty in favor of comfort. The business of the day would stop just after midday, the city falling into fevered dreams until evening when the summer sun lost some of its violence.
The attack wasn’t there yet. The spring was still lulling them all into lowering their guard. But it would come.
Cithrin was over two weeks gone, and likely on the water between Sara-sur-Mar and Carse. The days without her had been made from the same cloth as those with—payments to deliver, the strongbox to watch, the payments to retrieve. Now and then, a client or partner would need a few swords to walk with someone or something. Now that Pyk’s role was uncontested, she seemed to calm a bit, but she still generated a dozen minor tasks that had to be done and complained at the money it cost to accomplish them. So in a sense, nothing had changed, and in a sense it all had.