Book 2, Chapter 14: Skulking
The merchant’s quarter sat further inland than the embassy, past the imperial palace and its imposing domes. The group went through a tangle of streets that the sun had turned into baking ovens, and Clara was once again grateful that Iris had forced her to buy some dresses.
She glanced at Warren, who walked at her left, stiff and sweating in his formal suit and cravat. After it had become clear to him that the investigation was going to happen with or without his blessing, he quickly changed his tone and said he’d accompany them.
Conrad, by contrast, looked in his element. He’d traded his formal dress coat for a lighter one, keeping his saber at his hip, and his scowl was right at home alongside those of the busy merchants and shoppers haggling with each other. To his right was Luisa, wearing a champagne summer dress with flowy sleeves.
The market was chaotic and familiar at the same time, and Clara was surprised at just how modern it felt. Sun-bleached awnings stretched between stone buildings, covering stalls with a wide variety of bags of spices and very appetizing snacks. There was an energyin the air that she hadn’t really felt since coming to this world: chatter, food, music, poetry—all the signs of a vibrant city life, without the stuffy hierarchy that Arcadia was known for. The people of Istantinople, going about their day-to-day lives, did not seem to care for the formality of the Sultan-Basileus’s court.
Her stomach growled.
“Didn’t you eat before we left?” asked Warren.
“I have a fast metabolism.”
He gave her a look that suggested he did not believe her, though she didn’t know if that was because he was calling her bluff or because this world didn’t yet have the concept of metabolism.
Then a strong smell hit her: charred fish, drifting over from a few stalls down where a vendor was grilling fillets over coals. He flipped them with precision, then folded each one into flatbread with a fistful of onions and a squeeze of lemon.
Thank you, Stella, for introducing me to the wonders of seafood.
“How much for one?” Clara asked, already reaching for her coin purse. Bel had given her two hundred dinars to use around the city, though based on the cost of things in the ledger she’d gotten from Pedro, that did not seem to be a lot of money.
“Ah, a papist with good taste! Three dinars for one, five for two.”
Never mind, maybe two hundred is a lot. Something like this would cost around two or three pence in Westwick, so she mathed the rough conversion rate at one mark to one hundred dinars.
After confirming that the other three members of the group didn’t want any, Clara handed three coins to the vendor and took the wrapped mackerel.
And a faint, deliberate weight pressed against her ankle.
Clara looked down.
A cat looked back up at her.
Or rather, at her sandwich.
It was a lean, green-eyed orange tabby, which proceeded to press its head against her leg. Then it sat and wrapped its tail neatly around its paws.
She tore off a bit of the fish and dropped it for the cat.
A grave mistake, she realized, when a second cat, plump and black, appeared at her side. And then a third—pale gray and with beautiful blue eyes.
You’re all so cute. Even though I know you’re here to rob me blind.
“It seems you’ve made friends, Miss Casewell,” said Conrad.
“They are everywhere in this city, and they are much bolder than the ones in Arcadia,” Warren observed. “I am not sure you did yourself any favors by attracting their attention like this.” There was a ghost of a smirk on his face when a fourth cat came from behind her and tried to jump up at her sandwich.
“Fine. Fine.” She crouched, tore off several more pieces of the mackerel, and set them on the cobblestones. “Don’t tell your friends about this, you hear? I want to eat at least half of my sandwich.”
The cats fell upon the fish, meowing and purring as they ate. The gray one took the largest piece, then jumped next to Luisa, prompting her to yelp and hide behind Conrad.
“Lady Luisa, do you not like cats?” asked Clara.
“It is not a matter of like or dislike. I just find them… unpredictable.”
Clara nodded, then stuffed the rest of her sandwich into her mouth before more cats could come for her. Conrad glared at the animals, dutifully keeping them away from Luisa.
They continued on towards the address of Anis Clovos’s office. As they approached their destination, she registered an undercurrent of something else, beneath the haggling and hawking.
Tense glances and whispers, travelling in waves down the length of the market.
When they reached Anis Clovos’s office, a three-story building of colored stone at the end of a short lane off the main thoroughfare, they found the source of the commotion.
A dozen armed soldiers, nailing barricades into every door and window.
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One of them, with a longer and more ornate plumed hat, carried the banner of the two-pointed sunburst. Prince Justan’s sigil.
Warren eyed it. “It seems our honored accuser has been here, and brought with him the Sultan-Basileus’s peace.”
“They have the whole building sealed off,” said Luisa. “I doubt we’ll be able to get inside.”
“A pity,” added Conrad.
Clara frowned. Did he know we’d be coming? I guess we’ll have to shift gears.
A large trade enterprise like Anis’s wasn’t run by a single man. Even if the office was closed, his employees and business associates had to be somewhere.
“We should find the nearest pub,” said Clara.
The tavern was dim, the cool air thick with coffee, cardamom, and conversation. A few men glanced at Conrad’s saber when they entered, but said nothing. The four of them took a corner table, Clara taking the seat against the wall where she could watch the room.
The place wasn’t full, with it being in the middle of the afternoon and all, but more patrons trickled in by the minute. They’d settled on a plan during the walk over—Clara, Conrad, and Warren would pass themselves off as merchants hoping to buy spices in bulk, and ask around about Clovos and his business. Luisa declined to participate, citing her inability to act convincingly, which Clara thought was fair enough.
In theory, it was a fine cover. In practice, it turned out Luisa was not the only one without acting skills.
Conrad’s idea of playing a friendly merchant was to loom over a table and announce, in a tone better suited for interrogating, that ‘he wished to trade spices’. Warren did only marginally better, his tone so polished that he sounded less like a buyer and more like an undercover tax official. And the two or three men Clara approached herself answered in clipped half-sentences before abruptly remembering somewhere else they needed to be.
I’m starting to think we should’ve brought Iris.
It wasn’t only the bad acting, though. There was a wariness to the whole quarter that Clara had felt since they passed by Anis’s office.
After another twenty minutes of dead ends, Conrad walked to the bar and bought a round for the entire room—“with condolences for the regrettable passing of Anis Clovos.”
It was so painfully on the nose that Clara almost buried her face in her hands, and Luisa called it an inefficient use of money.
But free drink, it turned out, was a far better conversational lubricant than any of them.
The mood of the room thawed, and after a while two men drifted over to their table, cups in hand. One was thin and thickly bearded, with cautious eyes, and the other was younger and clearly a few drinks deep, judging by the color of his cheeks.
“You had business with Master Clovos?” asked the bearded one.
“In a way,” said Conrad. “We’re prospective clients from overseas. He came well-recommended, and we were hoping to do business with him.”
“Prospective clients?” The man raised an eyebrow. “You’ve come at a poor time. Nothing will move until the estate’s settled and the heirs stop circling. Full pay for us in the meantime, by guild custom, so I can’t complain too loudly—but if you want to deal, you’ll wait a month at least. Come to the office then, if you’re still in the city.”
“You worked for him?” asked Clara.
“Aye. Many of us here did. I did bookkeeping, mostly.” He took a measured sip. “He’ll be missed.”
“Lucky, though,” the younger one added. “Lucky we’re office, I mean. The warehouse lot aren’t paid a fixed wage, so they ain’t get anything if there’s no work to do. I’m sure they’d rather be hauling than drinking.”
Clara kept her voice light. “Warehouse? It’s a big operation, then?”
The bearded man shrugged. “Big enough.”
“Big enough?” The younger man laughed. “You’ve no idea, Miss. Master Clovos owned half the eastern wharves. We moved more tonnage than any other trading house in the Queen of Cities! Or so I’ve heard—I’ve never set foot in the warehouse, mind you.”
That earned him a sharp look from his companion.
“Considering the size of the ports here, that is an impressive operation for a spice merchant,” said Luisa.
Clara caught the thread, and she wasn’t about to let it go.
“You say you never went in?” she asked, as if it were idle curiosity. “You kept his books, and you never saw his stores?”
“None of us office folk did. Haulers only—handpicked, sturdy lads. Crazy pay, too! Well, when there’s work to do. But I’ll tell ya, Miss, I didn’t know there was so much saffron in all the East! Master Clovos was something else, nothin’ like the house I worked at before.”
“That’s enough out of you.” The bearded man hauled his companion up by the arm with an apologetic smile. “Sun and grief and drink don’t mix well. Pay him no mind. Good afternoon.”
He steered the younger man toward the door as the party exchanged glances.
They reached the eastern wharves as the sun was almost done sinking into the strait, casting an orange glow over the Esperança and the other ships of House de Bragança in the distance. The warehouse was easy enough to find—they just had to ask a port worker where Anis Clovos’s operation was. It was a long building of grey stone that hunched against the waterline. The main entrance had been shuttered, and there was no movement besides the cats roaming around the wharf, no bustle of loading or unloading cargo.
There was a smaller side door, but beside it stood two guards in full armor, a man and a woman with long sabers at their hips. They didn’t wear the robes and long hats of the janissaries, nor the colors of regular imperial soldiers, so Clara guessed they were private guards hired by Anis or his estate.
“Two of them.” Conrad put his hand on the hilt of his own saber. “I’ve been looking for an opportunity to test my forms against Easterners.”
“No, we should return to the embassy, Lord Conrad,” said Warren carefully. “We’ve learned something valuable already—just the fact that Anis kept his warehouse off-limits to his own workers gives us a thread to pull in court. There’s no need to be reckless.”
“It is not reckless, it is efficient,” Conrad protested.
“It could be construed as an act of war against a sovereign empire,” said Luisa.
“Only if they live to tell the tale.”
“Let’s take a step back,” said Clara. “Lord Conrad, we cannot kill anyone. Righton, we can’t go home here when there’s still more we can do for our client. I have an idea.”
They turned to her.
“I’ve been wanting to experiment with something. It is… sound magic. I’ve been working on it with Professor Morris.” Clara drew her wand from her satchel and turned it over in her fingers. “Follow me and cover your ears tightly—do not uncover them until I signal. There may be a way we can go in undetected.”
“Sound magic?” asked Luisa. “How does it work, exactly?”
Clara hesitated, and Warren’s eyes narrowed. He, of all people, would be able to tell when she was constructing a careful sentence.
“I’m afraid I don’t know the theory well, my lady. Professor Morris would be able to explain better.”
Luisa nodded, though she didn’t seem convinced.
“Casewell. Is this safe? Are you planning to attack them?” asked Warren.
“No, of course not. It’s just a… distraction. Look, if this doesn’t work, we’ll do as you say and retreat to the embassy.”
Clara stepped forward toward the guards, expression mild, trying her best to play a lost foreign woman who had wandered somewhere she shouldn’t. The other three followed a few paces behind, their palms pressed against the sides of their heads in an almost comical fashion.
“Good evening,” Clara said, as they straightened and reached for their sabers, glaring at her. “I wonder if you might help me. There’s something I’ve been needing to tell someone, and you two look like trustworthy folks.”
She stopped a few paces away and smiled.
This had better work, or it’s going to get really awkward around here.
“You see, I’m not from this world. I died in another one, and then I transmigrated here. I woke up in the body of a girl named Stella, a maid who’d just lost her life.”
Clara held her breath as their eyes went blank.