LYNN ABBEY:The Red Lucky

Bezulshash, better known as Bezul the changer, awoke to the honking of twenty outraged geese and a dream that something had struck the front door of his family's establishment at the nether end of Wriggle Way, deep in the Shambles quarter of Sanctuary.

"Bez?" his wife, Chersey, whispered. "Bez, are you awake?"

"I am," he assured her, despite the absurdity of the question: Nothing on Wriggle Way could sleep once the geese got going.

They both shucked their blankets. Barefoot, Chersey hurried to their children, four-year-old Ayse, and her little brother, Lesimar, both beginning to howl from the cradle they shared. Bezul spared the extra moment to find his boots and the antique, iron-headed mace he kept handy beside the master bed.

He was tiptoeing down the pitch-dark stairway when a patch of light appeared on the landing behind him.

"Bezul?" a woman asked, her voice gone deep with age. "Is that you?"

"It is, Mother." Bezul spoke loudly; the geese were still in high dudgeon. "I heard a strike against the door. I'm sure it's nothing, but I've got the club. Shut the door and go back to bed where it's warm."

By the lingering light, Gedozia did neither. The stairway shuddered beneath her unsteady footfalls.

"Mother—"

"It's them," she declared. "It's them come to steal what's left. Mind the shadows, your father says. They're waiting in the shadows. They came back. Came back with the bloody moon!"

Gedozia's body frequently awoke long before her mind. Her husband, for whom Bezul had been named, had been dead these last eighteen years, a victim of apoplexy, directly, and the Bloody Hand, indirectly. Gedozia had never recovered from his death. She was easier to deal with, though, when she was dream-addled. By the light of day, she lived on bitter tea and nostalgia.

"I'll mind," Bezul said. "You get back to bed, Mother."

She didn't, but the light from her lamp made it easier to shove through the geese milling at the foot of the stairs and find the door latch. Bezul trod precisely on a floorboard, engaging a well-oiled mechanism. A wooden post, barely ankle-high but stout and kiln-hardened, rose silently out of the floor a handspan away from the jamb. The post would halt the door's opening—for a heartbeat or two—in the event thieves were waiting on the other side. Bezul lifted the latch; the heavy door swung on its hinges and thumped against the post.

The slice of Wriggle Way visible through the partially opened door was empty save for the graying shadows of early dawn.

"Who's there?" Bezul called, his voice a trifle quavery.

Silence. Bezul noticed a pale lump near the threshold. He thought of the noise he'd remembered and bent to retrieve the object. The geese attacked his legs as he did. The birds were better than any dog when it came to watching a place, but they were completely untrain-able and never did learn the difference between owners and invaders. Bezul swatted the nearest beak and, with his arms flapping wider than their wings, shooed them from the doorway. The birds retreated, noisier than ever. They'd be lucky if silence returned before sun-up.

"A piece of cloth knotted around a stone. Someone's sent us a message."

Bezul picked casually at the knots. They were well-tied with oiled cord and held tight against his curiosity. He waded through the geese to the counter at the heart of the changing house. Chersey was beside him, lamp and children in hand, when he laid the wrapped fist-sized stone down for closer examination.

"So, what's the message?" Gedozia asked from halfway down the stairs.

The geese nipped at Ayse who shrieked louder than all the birds together. Flapping and honking and shedding shite, the birds waddled into the maze of shelves and niches where the more valuable and vulnerable portion of the changing house's stock was stored. It would take the luck of Shalpa, god of thieves, to get the flock penned up before they opened for business, but Bezul couldn't worry about that yet. He couldn't get the knots loose, either.

Chersey deposited Lesimar on the counter and put his still-shrieking sister beside him. When a quick pass with the lamp failed to show any bloody nips on the little girl's flesh, Chersey took the stone from her husband's hands.

"What's the message?" Gedozia repeated from the other side of the counter. She slid her lamp beside Chersey's.

Chersey's slender, agile fingers traced a loosening path along the cord and the length of it fell to the counter.

"It's just cloth," Bezul observed, more than a little puzzled.

"Sewn cloth," Gedozia corrected. "Give it here," she demanded and snatched it before her daughter-in-law could obey. "The hem torn off a shirt," she concluded.

"Maybe there's writing on it?" Bezul reached for the cloth.

Gedozia wouldn't relinquish her treasure. She rubbed the seam between her fingers and held it close to her eyes. Bezul could see enough of the fabric to know there were no marks upon it.

"What manner of mess—?" he'd begun when Gedozia yelped and the cloth fell from her fingers. "Mother?"

"Perrez," she croaked, a look of sheer panic forming on her face. "Perrez! O, my husband, they've taken our son! They've taken Perrez at last! It was all for nothing! All for nothing!"

Perrez, the last member of the household, was Bezul's much younger brother, his mother's favorite son, and a man who put more effort into avoiding work than into finishing it. He called himself a scholar, which wasn't an utter lie. There wasn't a musty manuscript in the changing house—in all of Sanctuary—that Perrez hadn't memorized in his relentless quest for treasure maps and clues. Perrez hadn't been around when Bezul closed up for the night, but scholars didn't keep workingmen's hours; scholars needed the excitement only a tavern could provide. Chersey fetched up the cloth and met Bezul's eyes with a worried frown.

"How can you be sure?"

"Marking stitches—"

"My stitches! My son!" Gedozia wailed, setting off the children and the geese.

Chersey squared her fingers over a pattern of dark-thread crosses embroidered into the cloth. "The laundresses use these to sort their work. Most of them can't read, you know, and one white shirt looks like another."

Home-brewed soap and a wooden tub set up behind the changing house weren't good enough for Perrez's shirts. Oh no—his shirts went clear across the city to a woman in the 'Tween who dosed them with bleach and blueing for two padpols apiece. It wasn't that Bezul begrudged the padpols. Appearances were important in a changing house. Though the bulk of their business came from ordinary folk, the bulk of their profit came from the aristocrat trades that Perrez brokered. High-colored, handsome Perrez showed off a bleached, blued shirt far better than Bezul, who took after his father's side of the family, ever could. But Perrez would swear and swear again that the laundress was a beldam liar when she came to collect her fee, when it was Perrez who lied as easily as the sun sparkled on the sea.

And now, a bit of Perrez's shirt had been thrown against the changing-house door.

What to make of it? Bezul wondered amid the cacophony. He lined up the cloth, cord, and stone on the counter. "They've taken him!" Gedozia keened. "They took him while you were sleeping!"

Bezul flinched. Short of tying Perrez to the bedpost, there was no way to keep him completely out of trouble and, by the thousand eyes of Father Ils, there was no convincing Gedozia that her most precious son drank and gambled his way into one tight corner after another.

Bezul had dreaded this night—had seen it coming for years. His heart was cold as he spun the cord between his fingers. Several moments passed before he noticed the sheen on his fingertips. Holding the cord to his nose, Bezul inhaled deeply. Fish oil… salt… wrack… the Swamp of Night Secrets on the far side of the White Foal River. He raised his eyes to meet his wife's.