4. Cain
4
CAIN
Lukan, the owner of this tavern, was an Arlander like Cain, but most of his clientele were Imperial heartlanders. Before he’d left Arland, Cain had imagined everyone living in the Capital as either functionaries of the prefect’s office or rich merchants, but he’d since learned that laborers and the poor existed here as well, that the streets were paved not with gold but with cobblestone, and that the walls were covered not with brocade silk but with chalky lime. And those who came to drink Lukan’s cheap swill were precisely those who laid such cobblestones and applied that limewash.
Cain lived not far from here. His room was above the olive oil shop where he worked, in a large market square close to some of the city’s many commercial docks, just west of the gates to the affluent old city. It was easier to forget about his past life, in that part of town that people from countless corners of the world called home.
Twelve years ago, in Kingsworth, the provincial capital of Arland, his parents had been wanted by the prefect’s guards on charges of sedition and treason against the Empire. For safety, they had placed their twelve-year-old son in the care of a traveler headed to the Capital. Cain had never heard from his parents again. The traveler had told him that a great purge was happening in Arland and it was no longer safe there. Maybe that was why he had been avoiding Arlanders ever since he had arrived in the Capital.
Lukan, being one of the few Arlanders in the neighborhood, was an exception to this rule. By now, Cain was a man of the Capital through and through, but the smell of Arlander food was something that he hadn’t been able to resist.
And Fienna. She had been an exception too—perhaps the greatest exception of his life.
Around midnight, when Cain dragged his beaten, throbbing body into the tavern, Lukan shouted greetings to him in Arlandais, which made a couple of the drunkards raise their heads from the bar to look at both Lukan and Cain. Lukan was skinny, tall, and middle-aged. There were many provincial men who would crop their hair short or iron it straight to look more like the heartlanders, but Lukan was determined to be the opposite, framing his angular Arlander face with shoulder-length, tightly braided hair that was adorned with the occasional blue cord weaved into the strands. Even more well-kept than his hair was his thick beard, which he kept trimmed and also braided with ornamental blue cord. Cain hadn’t seen another blue-braided hair and beard like Lukan’s since he’d left Arland more than ten years ago. Sliding the tavern’s doors open, Cain breathed in the smell of a savory vegetable soup that lingered in the air. Steam hovered like a fog over the boiling cauldron in the fireplace. It was a small establishment, but the tavern was regularly packed—the kind of packed where anyone needing to go to the latrine had to ask three or four others to move aside to make way. Many of the tables and chairs bore the marks of being hastily fixed, casualties of rowdy nights and inept carpentry.
The night was late, but the tavern was still half full. Earlier in the evening, when the patrons were just drunk enough, the mood here would have been boisterous, but by this hour the remaining laggards were either drunk off their feet or drinking silently, kept busy with their own thoughts. The tavern was quiet.
Cain limped toward the end of the cheaply lacquered bar. Every spot where those kicks had landed ached. Behind the bar, Lukan was wearing a collarless tunic even in this cold weather, perhaps to show the complex, traditional clan markings around his neck. Cain’s own markings were simplified and thinner, as had been the fashion in Kingsworth ever since the Empire came twenty years ago. Even the Arlander immigrants in the Capital still tattooed their children on their eighth birthday as was tradition, though clans hadn’t mattered since the Empire came to Arland and replaced the royal house with their prefect’s office. Seated near the end of the bar was a petite, well-dressed woman with her lustrous hair in a neat bun, a glass of spiced wine before her. She wore a black stola with a short hem and a brooch with a small sapphire on her chest.
As Cain approached, the woman shifted her stool a little to the left, giving him room. Cain nodded his thanks and to Lukan, who brought him a bowl of soup, he held up two fingers, a sign Lukan obliged by bringing a small glass filled almost to the brim with brown liquid.
“What happened to your chin?” Lukan asked as he wiped the bar so vigorously that its wobbling panels almost spilled the woman’s drink.
“Hand me a mirror,” Cain said, cleaning his steamed-up spectacles with his sleeve before putting them back on.
“Haven’t seen you this beat up in ages.” Lukan disappeared into the back room and returned with a small mirror.
Cain used it to examine his chin. The tear was rough and broad, big enough that his little finger would barely cover it. Lukan handed him the rag he was wiping the bar with. Cain looked at the rag, then at Lukan’s face, and frowned.
“Look, Cain, a wound like that, you’ve got to stitch it up properly.”
This bit of obvious advice was spoken by the bricklayer Fabricius, who sat at a table behind him holding a large mug in one hand and pointing at his own chin with the other. The three others who shared his table, their flushed faces as red as Fabricius’s, were also looking in his direction. Cain made a serious face and nodded. He dipped the edge of his sleeve into his drink and cleaned the wound, gritting his teeth at the stinging pain.
He held up the mirror once more. No luck—the ring had not left a clear impression. But he could surmise, tilting the mirror this way and that, that the ring hadn’t featured a mounted stone.
Lukan returned to wiping the bar. “You ought to be more careful, your face looks bad enough on a good day.”
Cain heard a laugh by his side. The woman in the black stola was holding her drink and looking rather intently at him.
A man like Cain walking in with a gaping wound on his face and being chastised by the tavern owner was all part of the scenery, so it wasn’t a strange thing at all to be looked at and talked to.
No. The strange thing here wasn’t Cain, but the woman. Her clothes did not let her blend in, and neither did her hairdo or her choice of drink. She was also alone. Most of the people who came to this place wanted to forget the aches and pains of the day’s labors by numbing themselves with drink, but not her. Nor was Lukan’s a place for courting. Above all else, it was how she was making no effort at all to hide the fact that she did not fit in. He had the feeling that nothing good could possibly come from getting involved with her.
“He’s the kind of man who’ll go back out there and get hit in the face again if it means a pretty lady like you will smile at him,” said Lukan as he put down his rag and topped up Cain’s glass.
Cain downed half of it. The smell of earth came up through his throat and into his nose. He hadn’t been of drinking age when he lived in Arland, but this smell, at least, was familiar since childhood. The drink taking effect gave him the shivers, and he turned to Lukan, whose dirty rag was now being used to wipe mugs.
“Name a rich Kamori in the Capital.”
“You know better than I do who’s who in this city,” replied Lukan.
“I’m asking anyway.”
“How rich?” Lukan held up the mug to the lamplight before stuffing his rag into it once more.
“Rich enough to wear Cassian velvet.”
Lukan raised his eyebrows.
“Aside from the Kamori councillor in the Commons? I don’t know. An ordinary provincial rich enough for velvet should be well-known, though.”
A high-and-mighty in the Imperial Commons Council or chestrating the murder of a lowly dye shop worker? An impossible notion to begin with, but Cain made an effort to remember who the Kamori councillor was. The councillor for Arland was a rich landowner, and Cain knew him only by name. Not even a councillor’s shadow would grace the likes of this neighborhood.
“Did you know that Fienna died this morning?”
“Fienna? The friend you always talk about? What happened?” Lukan’s tone was serious, but his hands continued to polish his mugs and glasses.
“She drowned in the Apathos.”
“Huh.” Lukan’s hands left the mug he was polishing and rose to stroke his beard. “I do seem to recall there’s one rather rich personage from Kamori. Yes, you’re probably not aware of her since she’s a merchant who comes and goes, not a woman of the Capital in the strictest sense.”
As Cain emptied the other half of his glass, Lukan in a low voice told him about a merchant named Gladdis. A woman who sourced local goods from not only Kamori but the whole of the greater Lontaria region to sell in the Capital, which meant she had also been to Arland and Ledon. Cain remembered that Fienna’s boss used to travel to that region with a great merchant.
“She has a monopoly license on five types of goods from the three provinces of Lontaria, according to a Kamori boy who comes here from time to time,” Lukan said with a note of envy, and then pointed at the bottle he’d poured from. “I think that is one of her imports.”
Monopoly licenses didn’t grow on trees, being among the most coveted privileges in the world. Such a merchant was guaranteed to have connections in one of the ministries, or even the Senate itself.
The woman sitting next to him had her face turned away, as if considering the bottles of spirit behind the bar, but was clearly eavesdropping. Cain watched her from the corner of his eye as he took in the information about Gladdis. He had a feeling he should avoid meeting her gaze directly. He pressed down on an impulse to run out of the tavern.
“Quite a big name for a provincial,” Lukan continued, “rumored to have been a close friend of a senator. Her residence here is more like one house out of many, it’s a mansion by the docks. No doubt she keeps a similar place in each of the seven cities of the heartland, as well as in the three provinces of Lontaria.”
“Where is she now?”
“Who knows? She stays at that mansion when she’s in the Capital. But she only drops by from time to time these years, I’m sure it’s just her servants there now.” Lukan explained the way to Gladdis’s house at the docks.
“Thanks.” Cain lifted his glass to finish his drink but there wasn’t a drop left.
“So, you think that Kamori merchant killed Fienna?”
“I don’t know yet.” Cain placed money on the bar and got up. “When I find out, I’ll let you know.”
The outside air was chilly. Closing the sliding door of the tavern, Cain adjusted his spectacles and glanced back at the bar where he’d been sitting, and his eyes met those of the woman in black. He quickly looked away and made haste down the long and dim alley toward home.