Page 20 of A Drop of Corruption

Though I did not speak Pithian, I caught the nature of the comment and bought her a pot of sot.

We talked, somewhat: she spoke very little imperial standard—her speech was almost entirely monosyllabic—and I knew no Pithian at all. But we laughed at each other’s outsized gestures as we tried to explain ourselves, and each knew what the other was saying.

Finally she leaned close, her green-stained eyes shining, and she said something in Pithian and cackled.

“Ahh. What was that?” I asked, smiling.

A silver-haired medikker nearby rolled his eyes and said, “She said your face is so pretty, but she is worried it is like a small horse.”

“What? She said what now?”

“It is a local expression, and a depraved one at that—she means, she is worried she might crush it while riding it.” He shook his head and muttered, “Damned Yarrows…”

I turned back to her. She was watching me with a greedy gleam in her eyes.

“Can you take me away from here?” I asked.

She grabbed me by the hand, and we left.

—

I’d heard itsaid that engravers are good lovers, for they remember what people want. I’d come to think this true, not just by the responses I’d witnessed when coupling—for such things, as I knew from my own experience, could be faked—but from how often I was invited back. Yet though I was attentive that evening, and grew passionate when I sensed she desired, and ferocious when she asked, I knew these acts were mere labor I paid for the moment after.

Afterward: when all was spent, and the shuddering grew still, and the sweaty limbs atop my own grew cool. Only then I could hold them and make the world small for me.

No more debts or moneylenders. No more bodies and blood. No more trivial little people burdened with hearts both vicious and dull. Only then, perhaps, the absence of Kepheus would burn a little less bright, and all would be small and controllable.

I lay there with my arm cast across her pale breast, my face lost in her auburn hair. I let the silence steal over me like a cloak.

Suffocate me,I told it,and let me sleep.

I tried very hard not to listen to the voice in the back of my head: the little one that pointed out that Ana had ordered me specificallynotto do this; the one that stolidly reminded me that Ana knew that I spent about half my evenings in someone else’s bed, and did not appreciate it.

Let me go, let me go,I told the little voice.I am owed something good, let me go.Yet now sleep would not come.

I sighed where I lay. Then the girl—I realized I still did not even know her name—stirred and rolled over to look at me.

I cracked an eye. Her grin had returned, as had the wild light to her eyes.

“Is all well?” I asked her warily.

She said something in Pithian—“Ika hora, dubira, aukiha”—and reached down and took my wick in her hand and massaged it. When it did not respond quickly enough to her liking, she sat up—still grasping me—gave me an appraising look, and nodded at the door and said the four words again.

I took the meaning immediately:Another round, or you can go.

“Ohh,” I said, somewhat crestfallen. “Really?”

Her eyes shone yet more brightly, and the cadence of her massage quickened.

I took a breath, estimating how much work I would have to do to earn peace tonight. “Well. If you insist.”

Chapter 9

Just before dawn I slippedout of the girl’s house to return to my own lodgings, exhausted and tottering. A fog was crawling out of the bay, so thick it was hard to see more than fifty span down the road, yet I’d engraved the path in my mind and knew the steps, even if I half-sleepwalked them now.

When I finally approached my lodgings, I heard a voice ring out of the fog: “What haveyoubeen up to?”

I stopped and spied Signum Tira Malo sitting on the stoop a few span down from my door. She smiled at me, her teeth dark from yet another lump of hina root.