"Your father came to me at the fishmonger's: 'Gedozia,' he says. 'Gedozia, he can't be trusted!—' "

"Praise Ils! It's about time—"

Gedozia seized Bezul sharply by the wrists. "Not your brother, the Ilsigi! The Ilsigi means to cheat Perrez out of the seventy royals! He's too sweet-natured, my Perrez. He'll never suspect a thing, until it's too late. Find him, Bezul. He's your brother. It's up to you to do what his father would have done. Bezulshash would have beaten this Ilsigi with a stick."

Bezulshash would have done no such thing and Bezul would have dismissed everything his mother had said, if it hadn't made a sour sort of sense when compared with the tale Dace had told.

Bezul broke free of Gedozia's grasp. "Hard to cheat a thief, Mother. He tricked that glass from the Nighter. Good as stole it—"

"The Nighter's a halfwit—and who's to say where he got it, eh? If he got it. If it's even what the Ilsigi trader wanted to buy. You're the one talking about glass. I thought it was a manuscript."

"You—" Bezul caught himself. The sun rose and set on Perrez, always had, always would, and telling Gedozia anything else was a waste of time. Best to go back to the beginning, to what she wanted. "You said I wouldn't find Perrez around here. Where will I find him?" "Uptown… in the Maze. The Unicorn."

"You can't be serious," Gedozia complained. "That's irreplaceable. It's worth four shaboozh, three at least—"

Bezul locked the chest. He tucked the key inside his jacket and left the urn where it was. "Don't say another word," he warned the woman who'd birthed him. "After I've settled with the Nighter, I'll go uptown, looking for Perrez. Don't convince me otherwise."

"You—" Gedozia began, but Bezul's darkest stare convinced her not to finish.

He returned to the front room where Lesimar was sitting in Am-men's lap and Chersey tended a desperate-looking woman trying to exchange an apron of windfall apples for three fishhooks. Had Bezul been the one behind the counter, he would have given the woman a single metal hook for the brown, wrinkled fruit that even the geese wouldn't eat. Chersey parted with two and a length of light silken thread pulled invisibly from the hem of a lady's dress left in the shop on consignment. Their eyes met as the woman departed.

"Has the Nighter gone?" Bezul asked, saying nothing—wisely— about his wife's generosity.

"The kitchen," she replied, meaning that she'd decided to feed him.

Dace sat on the floor beside the hearth, ignoring the chairs and table. He cradled a smallish bread loaf and a bowl of whey in his lap. By the looks of the whey as he dipped a morsel of bread in it, Chersey had fortified the weak milk with an egg. Thanks to their flock of night-watchmen, the changing house always had extra eggs. Four-year-old Ayse sat cross-legged in one of the chairs, her wide eyes not missing a thing as the Nighter ate with his fingers—something she was no longer permitted to do.

The young man wiped his hands on his breeches before taking the glass bulb Bezul offered. He seemed pleased, though a bit overwhelmed. Bezul's gift was bigger, he stammered, redder, and heavier—solid where the missing bulb had been hollow, but it was Ayse who got to the heart of matter:

"Is it lucky, Poppa? It's got to be lucky, doesn't it?"

Bezul answered with hope, not honesty, and got out of the kitchen.

Despite Gedozia's statements, Bezul didn't strike out for the Vulgar Unicorn. He clung to the hope that Perrez wasn't that foolish until he'd finished poking his head into every tavern and wine shop in the Shambles without meeting anyone who'd seen his brother recently. With his hope exhausted, and feeling quite foolish himself, Bezul plunged into Sanctuary's most infamous quarter.

It had been a year, easily, since Bezul's last encounter with the tangled, narrow alleys that passed for streets in the Maze. He'd nearly convinced himself that he'd missed a critical turn and would have to start over (getting in and out of the Maze wasn't nearly as difficult, by daylight, as finding a particular place) when he caught sight of the Unicorn's signboard. The sign was to Bezul's left, not his right, where he'd been expecting it, so he had missed a turn or two, or perhaps the gossips were correct and, in the Maze, all paths led to the Vulgar Unicorn.

The Unicorn's shutters were open, not that it made a difference. The air in the commons was as thick and stale as the shadows. Bezul leaned against a wooden upright, looking for Perrez, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the haze. A woman hailed him by name—

The woman coming toward Bezul was taller than him by a hand-span, heavier by at least a stone. Her red hair fairly glowed in the twilight and her bodice was cut so snug and low that her breasts jounced above her corset like fresh fish on a trawl line. She came to the changing house every month or so to change a sackful of padpols into fewer, better coins. Bezul knew her name; he might even remember it, if he concentrated on her face.

"Frog all, Bezulshash, what's brought you to the Unicorn?"

They were considerably less than an arm's length apart. Bezul would have retreated, but he had a post at his back. Clearing his throat, he stammered, then said, "I'm looking for my brother, Per-rez."

That name meant nothing to her (and Bezul hadn't remembered hers… It was Mimmi, Minzie, something like that), but his description of Perrez's scrupulously clean clothes, neatly trimmed hair, and his love of someone else's largesse rang a bell.

"You froggin' missed him, Bezulshash. He was here when I came downstairs—talking with the aromacist."

"The what?"

She shrugged, a very distracting gesture. Bezul missed her first words. "—of winter. Set himself up off the Processional. Froggin' fancy place: fancy bottles, colored oils, silks and tassels hanging from the walls."

"A perfumer?"

She shook her head and everything else. " 'Aromas' he called them, better than perfume. Said no man could resist his 'aroma' of passion. Frog all, Bezulshash—do I look like I need help attracting men? He never fit inside the Unicorn; a little like you, Bezulshash: You don't belong here. But he came by, every few days, late morning or early afternoon, when it was slow and quiet. He'd take one of the side tables, buy a whole ewer of ale, leave it, too—unless he got company—your brother, a handful of others. Come to think of it— they left together. First time, I think, for that; first time I noticed:

Your brother, he was tipsy, noisy. Don't think he'd've made it outside by himself—"

"A fancy shop off the Processional?" Bezul asked and tried to keep the rest out of his thoughts for a few moments longer. He was ready to leave, but found his way blocked. In his concern—his anger—he'd forgotten something more important than her name. "Stop by the changing house," he urged. "There's a pair of earrings tucked away with your name on them."

She grinned and let him depart.

The Processional between the harbor and the palace was neither the longest nor the widest street in Sanctuary. With the tight-fisted Irrune in the palace, it wasn't even the busiest street. Mansions, some of them still abandoned after the Troubles, lined both sides of the street. When the residents left their homes, they traveled in clumps. A solitary man was marked as a visitor and ignored.

Lord Kuklos—a bearded magnate with an oversized cloak, a bright-red hat, and a flock of aides—rushed past Bezul without a by-your-leave. Probably on their way to the tournament. A slower clutch of nursemaids and guards surrounding a pair of children stopped when the better-dressed boy threw himself into a tantrum. Probably wanted to go to the tournament.

The third procession bore down rapidly on Bezul from behind. A man with a clanging bell and a loud voice ordered him out of the way. Prudence, rather than obedience, launched Bezul up on a curbstone. He clung to a pedestal that had long since lost its commemorative statue while a woman wrapped in a sea-green mantle and seated in an open chair charged toward the harbor. A whiskery dog with jewels in its ears yapped at Bezul from the lady's lap. The rest of her retinue—a brace of underdressed porters that might have been twins, three breathless maids clutching their skirts with one hand, their mantles with the other; five guards whose legs were taking a beating from their scabbards, and the lead man with the bell— spared him not a single glance.