Songs of the Dying Earth

Elizabeth Moon AN INCIDENT IN USKVOSK

Once a mighty city rose beside the head of a deep gulf in the Sea of Sighs, and its ships plied their trade, and the magnificence of its buildings proved its wealth…but in these latter days, only a dusty town remained, buildings shabby, patched with stones from its earlier grandeur. Unimportant to most, a minor port, a stop on the caravan route across the land, Uskvosk had shrunk and faded in the bleak millennia of the sun’s decay, and its population held many idiosyncratic beliefs with ferocious tenacity.

Midafternoon in the dry season, with the bloated sun hanging sullenly over the town, and most folk with nothing better to do than slump by a window and watch passersby, was not the best time for an assignation. It was, however, the only time that Petry, general dogsbody at the Bilge & Belly, the locals’ name for Herimar’s First-class Drinking & Dining, Superior Rooms Available, Sea Views Extra, could be sure his chosen outbuilding was empty.

In caravan season, the stable would have been full and busy, but caravan season was a quarter year away. Now the partitions intended to keep beasts separate made private nooks, suitable, Petry thought, for an afternoon’s exploration of the town lady of pleasure he most favored. He had saved enough for her reputed fee, in battered copper slugs stolen, one by careful one, from under the beds of drunken merchants, while removing their stinking chamberpots. She would not be busy at this hour. And surely she would rather lie with him, a sweet innocent lad as he appeared, than with the kind of men who came to the Bilge & Belly before attending Aunt Meridel’s Treasure-house, the high-walled establishment in which the fairest of the town’s professional ladies spent their evenings.

Now Emeraldine stood in the doorway, all ripe lips and riper body, golden curls tumbling to her plump shoulders, but scowling instead of smiling — eyes narrowed to slits, chin jutting, arms folded stiffly. “What’s this? The stable? Where’s my surprise?”

“In here,” Petry said, doffing his boy’s cap and making a broad gesture, such as storytellers made. “Ten coppers’ worth, I’m telling you truly.” He opened his hand so she could see the coppers.

Her face relaxed a little, but she did not step forward, despite his bow and second flourish of the cap. “Petry — you’re a sweet boy, but I fear you have mistook me. Pillow companion I am, and will be till the day I die, but I do not lie with children. You are but half-grown, lad. Talk to me again in a year or two, when you’ve some growth and we can both take pleasure in it.”

“But — but I am old enough—” Petry struggled to keep his voice high enough for a boy’s.

Her eyes narrowed again. “If you were able, Petry, it would mean you were a dwarf, and while I do not lie with children out of care for them, I would not lie with a dwarf for care of my pride. As you surely know, such are unlucky and deserve the stoning our custom demands. Are you then a dwarf pretending to be a boy? I’m sure Master Herimar, who gave you work out of pity for an orphan, would be glad to know—”

Petry cringed. Discovery would be disastrous. Besides, he wasn’t a dwarf, he was simply a very small man. “I’m not! I’m not a dwarf! I just thought — there’s a boy on the docks, said he’d had a woman and he’s just a half-year older than me—” Older than his apparent age; he had topped thirty in the previous dry season.

She snorted. “If you mean Katelburt, he’s a very young looking fifteen; he lies about his age all the time. But you, young Petry—” She came a step nearer, put out a hand to his face, stroked his cheek, kept boy-smooth by use of a depilatory. “You, lad, are too young. I understand your curiosity, and honor your effort to save up my fee. I’ll tell you what. You can look all you want at what awaits you when you’re old enough, so that the first sight of a woman’s body won’t affright you.” She undulated into the stable; Petry scampered past her, not daring even a pat on her hip, to the stall he had prepared with stolen straw and borrowed bed linens. Smaller than the great roach stalls, it would have made a cozy nest for lovers.

“You sit there,” she said, pointing to the far corner of the stall. “Be a good lad now, and do not think of trying to touch. This is education, not entertainment.”

Petry sat where she indicated, cursing the superstition that forced him to maintain the illusion of boyhood. With no more delay, she lifted her striped skirts to reveal dimpled knees, then plump white thighs, then — he gaped at the view as she held her skirts aside with one hand and fumbled down her bodice for a key to unlock the cage of her secrets.

“PETRY! Lazy mudspawn! These pots are still filthy!”

At Herimar’s bellow, Emeraldine grimaced, shrugged, and dropped her skirts as Petry scrambled up.

“Better go, boy, or you’ll lose your—”

“PETRY, damn you! If I find you loafing in the shade I’ll kick your skinny ass halfway to the docks—”

Petry seethed with frustrated lust, and darted forward; Emeraldine grabbed him by the arm, forced his hand open, and peeled the coppers out of it like peeling seeds from a melon. “You surely didn’t intend to rob me of my fee,” she said too sweetly, as she dropped the coins into the pocket of her wide sleeve. Petry jerked away; her chuckle followed him out into the hot afternoon, where Herimar, vast and purple with rage, grabbed him by the ear, belabored his backside with a billet, and flung him in the general direction of the cook, who thumped his head with a spoon and soon had him head-down in the dirtiest cauldron, scrubbing until his fingers were raw. It was no benefit to his feelings when he heard Emeraldine and Herimar talking. Would she tell Herimar about the straw and the sheets? If so, he was as good as dead.

The sun went down, a soft ooze of deep crimson, but Petry’s work did not end until late night, when he finished the last of the dinner cookpots to Cook’s satisfaction. Herimar shoved him out the door. “You lazed all afternoon,” Herimar said. “You don’t get a place to sleep for that. Be here at first light, or else.”

Petry found a snug spot under a pile of trash two alleys down, but the day’s misfortune hunted him down even there, for in the middle of the night a cutpurse ran down the alley, pursued at a distance by one of the town’s heavy-footed nightwatchmen. Petry woke when the thief stepped on him, tripped, and fell; Petry yelped aloud; the thief, cursing, leapt up and ran on. Petry struggled up, hearing more footsteps coming, and one hand came down on a soft, lumpy object. Muddled with sleep as he was, he did not recognize it in time to toss it away, but picked it up just as the watchman rounded the corner.

Very shortly, he stood before the serjeant of the watch, hands bound and the evidence of his thievery laid out on the serjeant’s desk. A rich velvet purse, a lady’s purse, heavily embroidered with flowers and stinking of perfume, now empty: when the serjeant had tipped out its contents, gold terces and silvers of local coinage glinted as they fell, chiming a dangerous melody on the desk.

“Well, boy,” the serjeant said. He was both tall and wide, straining the buttons of his bright yellow uniform. Two men stood leaning on the wall behind the serjeant, one caressing the handle of a cat-o’nine-tails. “Proper little thief you are, ain’t you? Been seein’ you at the Bilge & Belly, been hearing of missing coppers here and there — your work, I don’t doubt.”

“I–I didn’t — this isn’t—”

“You expect me to believe someone just came by and dropped a fancy lady’s purse with gold and silver coins on your head while you were innocently — what were you doing in that alley, anyway?”

“Sleeping,” Petry said.

“Sleeping,” the serjeant said, in a tone that conveyed how little he believed that. “In a trash pile. Of course. When everyone knows you should be asleep in the Bilge and Belly stable…unless Herimar found you thieving and threw you out—”

“No!” Petry tried to think of am explanation that would get him out of trouble but hold up if they talked to Herimar. “He didn’t throw me out. He just said I couldn’t sleep there tonight but to be back in the morning…”

“Why couldn’t you sleep there tonight? He have a full house?”

“I dunno,” Petry said. “I mean, I dunno if he had a full house. He just said…”

“And here you are with a purse full of gold and silver. If you didn’t have a steady job with Herimar, boy, it’d be thumbs and toes for you right now. As it is…a public stripping and a day in the stocks…”

Petry tried to look pitiful and young. Public stripping would reveal the truth — that he wasn’t a young boy at all, but a very small man — what some would call a dwarf, a freak, a mutant, and send to the stake for stoning. A night and day without the depilatory he’d obtained with so much effort and cunning from the witches of the waste and his beard would show. Then the stones would come…and he’d die, painfully and thoroughly. So it wasn’t hard to look pitiful and scared. It wasn’t working, either…no sympathy at all in the faces of the big men around him.

Then the serjeant pursed lips and sighed. “On the other hand…”

“The other hand?” Petry squeaked.

“It’s the races, you see.”

Petry didn’t see, but anything that might save him from exposure he wanted to hear.

“The roach races, boy. Just a few days away, the south-coast yearly race meeting. We thought we had a sure thing, this year. Old Maggotory, used to be head of the local constabulary — that’s us — went to breeding racing roaches when he retired. He’s got a good one now, real good. Won some races out of town, healthy, training well. Sure thing to win the Cup this meet…or so we thought, when we wagered the entire pension fund on it, against those fool wormigers who think because their ships move fast across the sea, they can judge the speed of a roach.”

Petry could see where this was going. “But?”

“But now the word is that the Duke of Malakendra, who’s never bothered to send any of his prize beasts here before, has noticed the size of the purse and is sending his champion, undefeated winner of a hundred races. And it is this roach, whom the wormigers saw run in another place, they bet upon.”

“Why do you tell me this?”

“Because every roach has its cuttlemites, as you surely know — you work in the stables, betimes; you have seen them, no doubt, scribble-scrabbling in the interstices of the roaches’ cuticles, nibbling away those itchy accumulations. And you’ll have noticed, maybe, that if one drops off, sated with its meal, it always returns to the same beast, does it not?”

“Aye…it does.”

“We consulted the mage Kersandar, who by diverse arts and for a sum I will not reveal told us that the Duke’s roach owes its celerity to a special breed of cuttlemites, not known to this region. The Duke obtained their eggs and established them in his stables, where they reproduced and attached to each of his own roaches…and to this champion sent to ruin us.”

Petry examined the nails of one hand as if fascinated by the sediment thus revealed. “I pray you, explain—”

“Do you not see? A racing roach must have its cuttlemites, to keep its cuticle clean and its crevices free of those exudations which by nature the creatures produce, and which, accumulated, irritate and annoy, so the roach moves erratically at best, and always slowly. If we but remove the cuttlemites from Duke Malakendra’s roach, and transfer them to Maggotory’s beast, the Duke’s will not run so well, ours will run better, and our funds are safe. If not — we lose all. None of us has any excuse to be working around the Duke’s roach, nor is small enough, light enough, to infiltrate the stable without being noticed, but you, my lad, are the one who might save us.”

“How?”

“It is certain that the Duke’s roach will be stabled at Herimar’s from tomorrow or the next day. You will surely have access to it; Herimar has no one else to clean the stable. If you perform this task, it might be possible to overlook your thieving, since you are so young and can be retrained…”

Petry bethought himself of the certainty of death if he failed, and quickly agreed to do his best. The serjeant kept him close in the watch-house until it was time for him to return to Herimar. “Abase yourself,” the serjeant said. “Whatever is necessary to regain your place — for I am sure you did not tell us the whole truth. It matters not, if you are able to perform your task.”

Before dawn, Petry crouched outside the main door of the Bilge and Belly, face washed, hair combed, cap tipped rakishly to one side. When Herimar threw open the door at last, Petry leapt up and bowed, bowed once, twice, thrice, sweeping his cap to the dust each time.

“Well, you rascal,” Herimar said. “Are you ready to work, then?”

“With all my heart,” Petry said.

“It’s your hands I want,” Herimar said. “At work. You can start by cleaning the stable; we have a valuable beast coming in.” He led Petry through the inn’s main downstairs room without even time to snatch a crumb from the bar. Still talking, he led the way to the stable. “The Duke of Malakendra’s famous racing roach, here — and a premium paid for the exclusive use of the entire stable. Every stall to be cleaned, swept, and raked. No dung, no webs, no loose dirt. In this one, spread straw, make it level. I shall inspect your work later. It’s essential the creature win — for to obtain the custom, I had to lay a wager risking all my possessions, including this inn. You may earn yourself bread and cheese, if you do well.”

When Herimar was well out of the way, Petry slunk down to the end of the row and dug up his small pot of depilatory, smearing it on his face and body. The bristly hairs already rising from his skin fell off at once. Then he set to work, his belly clinging to his backbone with hunger, but he had no choice. He thought of many potent curses to lay on Herimar, but if the man sickened or died before the Duke’s roach arrived, the constabulary would blame him.

When Herimar came back, Petry had cleaned all the stalls to the walls and bedded the one Herimar specified with straw to the depth of his elbow. Petry bowed, doffing his cap and waving it about. “You see, gracious Master, I have performed all you asked, to the last detail. Please, sir, a morsel to break my fast.”

Herimar dug his hand into the straw. “Deeper,” he said. “Twice as deep. I didn’t mean a boy’s elbow deep, but a man’s. Are you stupid as well as lazy? Do that, and you can come to the kitchen door. You are at least working.”

Grumbling to himself, but no louder than his empty belly, Petry added straw until it reached his own armpit, then went to the kitchen where the cook, without looking at him, handed out a half-loaf of stale bread and a lump of hard cheese rimed with mold.

He was halfway through his lunch when the Duke’s roach arrived, surrounded by liveried roachifers, each holding one of the sandspider-fiber ropes that kept the creature in check, their black-and-white tunics and red leggings setting off the roach’s gleaming dark crimson elytra with inlaid silver scrollwork. The Duke’s own Roachkeeper Extraordinary led the way, wearing a wide hat layered in black and white plumes, a white cape edged in black and white sandspider fur, a crimson shirt with full sleeves and baggy black trousers tucked into crimson boots. He led a pack animal carrying sacks of roach-bait that kept the creature moving forward.

Herimar, bowing and scraping for all he was worth, led the way into the stables; the Roachkeeper signaled his assistants to follow, and the great roach, leg by leg, squeezed through the gateway and into the stall prepared for it.

“We require a dungpicker,” the Roachkeeper said, in a tone that suggested he expected Herimar to offer a selection of them for his inspection.

Herimar grabbed Petry by the shoulder and shoved him forward. “Here you are, good sir. Name’s Petry — smart lad, does exactly what you tell him.”

The Roachkeeper stared at Petry as if at dung on his shoe. “Well…if that’s the best you can do…you, boy, you do exactly what you’re told and nothing else, hear? And no gossiping about Magnificence out in town!”

“No, sir,” Petry said.

“And no eavesdropping!”

Petry attempted a shocked expression that seemed to satisfy the Roachkeeper, who turned to Herimar. “I will require your best room for myself. My roachifers will stay with the champion and will require bedding in the stable, and their meals served to them there.”

“Of course,” Herimar said. “Come this way, good sir.”

The rest of that day, the roachifers ordered Petry about as if he were their exclusive servant. He had to bed a stall to either side of the roach with straw, and fetch sheets to lay over it; he had to bring buckets of water; they demanded dishes not on the menu and complained about the quality of the crockery. During that time he had no need to eavesdrop, as they talked freely as if Petry had no ears. He heard the gossip of the Duke’s court — which girls they’d bedded, which they fancied, when the Duchess might birth the next, which servants were cheating the steward. The only matter of interest to him was the recent illness and death of the Duke’s dwarf jester.

“Such an easy life,” said one. “Fed from the Duke’s own table and all the ale he could drink, all for acting the fool and letting people laugh at him.”

“I wouldn’t like that,” said another.

“For meat every day and a skinful of ale? They could laugh all they wanted, and I would be laughing too.”

Petry felt the same way, but saw no way to get the Duke to hire him. Here, he was known as a beardless boy of no particular talent, fit to carry straw and dung and scrub pots. How could he prove himself without getting killed for it?

The next afternoon, when the roachifers had taken the roach out of town for a workout and Petry was hoping for a quick nap, one of the watchmen came to the inn and demanded to have a cask of ale delivered to the watch-house. Herimar beckoned to Petry. “Take the handcart, and be very sure you do not crack the hogshead or damage the cart or it will be the worse for you.” Accompanied by the watchman, Petry pushed the cart down to the watch-house.

“Tell me all,” the serjeant said, once the cask had been set up and broached. He sucked the ale off his whiskers; no one had offered Petry any.

Petry recounted the little he knew — the creature’s size, its name, and the care being taken of it.

“Well, then. First we’ll need a pellet of its dung, to season the bait. Then we’ll give you the cuttlemite bait, and a jug to put them in. Drag the cuttlemite bait from its side to the jar; they’ll follow the scent.”

“They won’t let me touch the beast…how am I supposed to get its cuttlemites?”

“You collect its dung…surely you have to be close to it to do that.”

“No — they take it out to exercise; I’m only allowed in the stall then. And the roachifers sleep in the stable with it — they never leave it unguarded.”

The serjeant exchanged glances with his men. “That still might work. We get the dung and make the bait, then — you take their meals to them, don’t you?” Petry nodded. “Then you’ll have to drug them.” The serjeant pulled out a box from below the desk and rummaged in it, coming up with a flat-sided bottle, glass-stoppered. It had no label. “See that you drop a thimbleful in the food or drink of each roachifer this evening. Daggart will obtain a sample from the dungheap on his afternoon rounds. When your work’s done and the inn’s locked up, one of us’ll be out behind the stable, on guard as it were, with the cuttlemite bait.”

“What if the roachifers taste something?”

“They won’t. The wizard Kalendar created for us this most potent soporific, undetectable but by another wizard. Very useful for those times when—” The serjeant stopped abruptly, flushing. “Never mind. Use it tonight; the race is day after tomorrow, time for the roach to miss its cuttlemites, but not time enough to fetch any from the Duke’s stronghold.”

Petry put the potion in the pocket of his vest and raced back to the inn, turning in the handcart to a scowling Herimar.

“Get yourself out there and make sure the stall is clean,” Herimar said. “They’ll be back from its training run soon.”

Petris found only two more dung pellets in the stall and carried them out just as the roachifers led their charge in the gate. “Just a moment, goodsirs,” Petry said, bowing. “And I will bring your supper.”

“I don’t think so,” one of them said. “Not with the filth you’ve got on you. We’ll have a nice fresh serving wench, and you can tell the Cook that — without touching our trays, understand?”

The Roachkeeper Extraordinary had already gone inside by that time; the roachifers led Magnificence into the stall. Petry wished blisters on their feet and hands and boils everywhere else as he carried the dung across the yard to the dungheap and jogged over to the kitchen door. Daggart came out of the inn, hitching up his belt and twirling a billet, just as one of the watchmen did every day. Petry ignored him. Cook was piling the trays with pannikins of sliced meat and gravy, bowls of deep-fried insects, boiled vegetables, and a whole loaf each of fresh bread, still steaming.

“So you’re finally here,” Cook said.

“Please, Cook, the roachifers want a serving wench instead of me…”

“I don’t wonder. Boys are always dirty,” Cook said. “Put anyone off their feed, the way you look and smell.” He sighed heavily. “I’ll have to fetch one of the girls…” He turned away, bellowing.

Petry pulled out the potion bottle and put two drops in each serving of meat, each serving of vegetables, and then, with great care, spat in them as well, and stirred them with a grubby finger. If they all sickened…it would not be counted his fault. The rest of the potion he poured into the jug of ale. He was across the yard, lifting a bundle of thorny sticks for Cook’s oven, when one of the girls came out, whining that she couldn’t possibly carry that many trays at once. Cook yelled, she yelled, and eventually another girl came out. They both carried trays to the stable.

It was well into the second watch when Petry finished the last of the supper pots, got his meager supper — no meat or gravy for him — and heard the kitchen latch snick to behind him. He sauntered across the yard to the wash house, biting hunks off his stale bread, and adding another curse to the pile of them he planned to topple on Cook’s head when he had enough money for a magician’s fee. From the stable, he heard snoring — at least two of the roachifers were sleeping soundly and perhaps the rest did not snore.

At the back of the wash house, he wiggled out the supposedly thief-proof window, having loosened the bars in advance, and moved silently along the alley wall to the end wall of the stable, then around to the back, where he found the serjeant and several watchmen waiting with an earthenware jug: the cuttlemite baited rag, the cord to lower it by, and a rope through the handle to lift the jug. Petry tied the rope around his waist.

Two men lifted him high enough to reach the edge of the roof. Petry shinnied over the edge and pulled himself onto the mismatched collection of warped boards, tiles, shingles, branches, and thornbush thatch that served now in place of the original roof. Herimar, always unwilling to spend a copper without need, insisted that his stable roof offered superior ventilation and was healthier for any beasts housed therein. Petry untied the rope from his waist and looped it around the board he’d pushed through the roof and tied in place for just this purpose.

Slowly, carefully, Petry crept forward, testing each separate unstable surface, wary of the slightest noise, which the roachifers below would surely hear if not adequately under the influence of the drug. Fortunately, the multiple glowspheres the guards had deployed against thieves gave sufficient light to outline the roof sections, and made it easier for him to keep from falling through.

Something rustled below. Petry put his eye to one of the many vacancies and looked down on the great roach, stirring restlessly in its stall. The silver scrollwork inlaid on its elegant elytra left bare the area where its rider would sit. The roach lifted its elytra, releasing the gauzy underwings, fluttering them, and a strange eldrich fragrance, heady and alluring, rose to Petry’s nostrils. And there, for the first time, Petry saw the glitter of something moving, something that must be the cuttlemites, gently grooming the great beast. He peered as far headward of the beast as he could. The long, sensitive antennae waved about, one almost reaching the roof.

Petry shifted the shingle nearest him — now he could see the liveried roachifers, sound asleep in the stalls on either side of the great roach. So the potion had worked, or apparently so. He slithered ungracefully down the slant of the roof, unlooped the rope from which hung the jar of cuttlemite bait, and pulled it up. After a dicey crawl back up the roof, he unplugged the jar, pulled out the bait-soaked rag already knotted to a cord, and sniffed it. He could detect nothing but a faint smell of roach, but the serjeant had sworn it would attract cuttlemites better than a roach itself.

He lowered it through the gap he’d made between two boards until it touched Magnificence of Malakendra’s back, right where the jockey would sit. The pronotum, the serjeant had said that was. Nerves had been cut, so the roach would not reflexively open its wings at the sensation of the jockey’s weight.

The roach’s antennae wiggled, but it did not react otherwise. Petry wondered if the roach could smell the bait, as well as its cuttlemites. He began counting, as instructed. At first he saw nothing, then a faint ripple, moving forward from the roach’s rear, and backward from its head, that must, he thought, be the cuttlemites. The cord began to cut into his hand as the cuttlemites crawled onto the rag. The lower end, above the rag, appeared frayed as cuttlemites climbed up it, as well, to get their palps on the bait. At last, and some unimportant number less than he’d been told to count, he had enough, and pulled the cord up, smoothly, not too fast.

The hardest part was getting the rag and its cuttlemites through the gap in the roof without letting them bump against it. Once they were out, he poked the rag back into the jar with a stick, coiled the cord on top of it, plugged the jar, and crawled back down the roof to the back stable wall, where he lowered the jar to the serjeant. When he landed in the alleyway, the serjeant and his men were already out in the street beyond; he made it back to the wash house with no alarms, and set the bars back in place before stretching out on the floor.

Next morning, he woke to shouts that mingled worry and anger, just as someone kicked open the wash-house door.

“No, he’s here!” That was one of the roachifers. “Sound asleep, too. Get up, roach-dung! Get out. We’re searching for evidence.”

“Evidence?” Something tickled in Petry’s hair and he was instantly sure it was a cuttlemite that would prove him guilty. He struggled not to scratch.

“Did you drug that swill you fed us last night?” the roachifer said, shaking his shoulder. “Couldn’t have tasted anything in that disgusting liquid they call ale around here—”

“Hold on there,” Herimar said. He was turning purple again, Petry noticed. “That’s an insult, sir. There’s nothing wrong with my ale. Brew it ourselves we do, best quality…”

“Out of dirty socks and chamberpots, by the way it tastes,” the roachifer said, still holding Petry. “If it wasn’t drugged, it was poison to start with. We’d none of us sleep on watch without—” The roachifer was eyeing the Duke’s Roachkeeper Extraordinary, who had slept in the inn’s best room, due his position.

“Let us consider all possibilities,” the Roachkeeper Extraordinary said. “Our host has not had the benefit of comparing his ale to that brewed by the Duke’s brewmaster, but though it is of course inferior to that served the Duke at his own table, I found it not undrinkable at all — intriguing, really, the hint of delunkin berries and just a touch of saltgrass.”

Herimar’s face went through several expressions and finally settled into a nervous grin that Petry judged related to the bulk of the Roachkeeper Extraordinary and his weaponry…and the fat wallet at his belt.

“This boy, now,” the Roachkeeper said. “Boy, did you bring the men their food last night, as always?”

“N-no,” Petry said. “They — the roachifers — asked to have a girl bring it—”

“Oh, did they!” The Roachkeeper Extraordinary shot his men a look of disdain. “A pretty one, did they specify that?”

“No, no,” one roachifer said. “This boy was hauling dung, is all, and we didn’t want his dirty fingers in our food. The lasses inside, they’re cleanly. And we were hungry and didn’t want to wait.”

“Did you water your charge before you ate?”

“Yes, Roachkeeper—” “Of course, Roachkeeper—”

“And where was the boy, when the serving girl brought you your supper?”

The roachifers didn’t know, but when all the servants were questioned, Cook’s evidence was conclusive: Petry had come to tell him the men wanted a serving girl that night; Cook had agreed the boy stank of roach dung, and sent him to get firewood for the morning’s baking. Cook had fetched Pecantia, who argued the job was too hard, and then Scyllinta to help her, and the two girls had come back after awhile, flushed and giggling…he had seen Petry carrying bundles of wood to the side of the oven.

“Did they…” The Roachkeeper Extraordinary eyed his men again, and they shuffled their feet. “Well, let the boy go, Jost. If anyone drugged your food, if you didn’t drop off on your own from drinking too much of Master Herimar’s unique ale and pillow-dancing with those girls, it certainly wasn’t this little fellow.”

The roachifer let go Petry’s shoulder and shoved him away; Herimar pointed at him. “Now you’re up, you’ll start sweeping — unless, gentlesirs, you wish the roach’s stall cleaned immediately—”

“No!” all the roachifers said at once. The Roachkeeper Extraordinary expanded on that. “The beast is not himself this morning, some trifling irritation perhaps, and it is best not to introduce strangers to it at such times.”

“Sick?” Herimar asked. “The race—” His face paled; Petry knew he was thinking of the wager he had made.

“It will be fine by race time,” the Roachkeeper Extraordinary said. “Roaches in training do often develop minor problems — sabotage is the only thing we have to fear, really, and I suspect my roachifers simply drank so much last night the fumes affected the creature’s breathing orifices. Today—” He glared at his men. “Today, serve them nothing but plain water and bread. It will clear their heads.”

For the rest of that morning, Petry swept and carried, fetched out full chamber pots and scrubbed them, all the while listening, listening. The two girls burst into tears when accused and denied all, even the obvious — for both had the signs of illicit encounters on their persons, the telltale little bruises and rednesses which could be expected, and a silver each in their sleeve pockets that Herimar had certainly not paid them.

Herimar was furious, Petry gathered, not because the girls had been playing bounce-the-bunnies in his inn, but because they had not paid him his share of their fee. He took both silvers to teach them a lesson; they glared at him behind his back, and fell to whispering. He called for the pot the ale had been in, but Petry had already washed it—” Cook said clean up all the dishes,” he said.

Herimar glared at him. “Don’t act so virtuous, scum-boy. You are up to something, don’t think I don’t know it! Stealing a finger of sugar from the kitchen, or grabbing a girl behind my back…you watch yourself, see?”

Petry thought it wise to withdraw, and finished cleaning the upstairs rooms without moving a single copper slug from its owner’s possessions.

All the rest of that day, he saw roachifers going in and out of the stable. He came at their call to the stable doors, fetching water and carrying away wet towels to dry in the sun.

“Is your beast fevered?” Herimar asked on one of his own frequent trips to the stable doors. “Would he not be better in the open air of the yard?”

“No,” the Roachkeeper said. “He is merely a little uncomfortable and we are massaging him…there’s a spot where the saddle may have galled.” Petry could hear rustling from within, as if the roach were scrabbling in the straw, not just shifting in its stance.

A spot where the saddle might have galled? Where the rag soaked with cuttlemite bait had rested through that long, long count? Was it the bait, or was it the many cuttlemites that had gathered there to feed on the bait?

Later in the afternoon, Petry went once more with a large jug of ale to the watch-house — again, a watchman had stopped by the Bilge & Belly to ask for a delivery — and he reported to the serjeant all he had seen and heard.

“You give a good report, boy,” the serjeant said. “Ever think of becoming a watchman when you grow up?”

“Er…I hadn’t, sir…”

“That’s good, because you’re far too young and there’s still the little matter of your thievery. But there might be work for you, now and then, since you’ve proved yourself so far. If the Duke’s roach loses, and Herimar’s bankrupt, you’ll need another way to live, and I’d hate to see a lad with your talents taken up as a pickpocket.”

In other words, Petry realized, he would not be free of his obligation to the serjeant even after this.

Race day at last — the townsfolk crowded the lanes on the way out to the ancient track, once used for racing chariots but now modified for giant roach racing. Herimar left early to get a seat in the Merchant’s Box. Petry tried to sneak out the window of the wash-house again with a couple of wooden house-tokens he’d pilfered and hoped to trade for drinks at the track, but a grinning watchman waited outside and delivered him to the serjeant, who kept a firm fist knotted in Petry’s collar all the way to the racetrack.

Roaches, unlike the other species humans had raced over the millenia, had neither the innate desire to run, nor the desire to chase down prey. Instead, roaches ran because they were chased, chased by something that ate roaches. At minor race-meets, the more common and less expensive gritches were used as chasers, so that even the slower race-roaches came home alive, but for important races such as this, owners hired a giant shrew, and had to commit a certain percentage of the roaches themselves to the fee. This was non-negotiable, since otherwise the shrews would attack the humans. Only when sated with roach-flesh could they once more be muzzled and sedated.

The roaches ran the prescribed course only because, with their wings disabled, they could not fly, and the incurved track boundaries gave their jockeys a leverage advantage if they tried to run up and over them. A series of winches mounted to the high pommel of the saddles gave the jockeys control of the roaches’ front legs.

In the post parade, teams of roachifers led the race-roaches past the shrew’s wheeled cage, to get its scent and understand their peril. Maggatory’s entry, a gleaming golden-copper named “Arresting,” high-stepped past the chittering shrew, flicking its antennae. It was ranked second in the betting. Petry had not seen it before; it was a little longer and slimmer than Magnificence of Malakendra, but moved smoothly despite its agitation. After it came a dark brown roach belonging to the Harbormaster, its elytra inlaid with a turquoise wave design.

“No threat,” the serjeant said. “Now if this was a sprint, maybe, but it won’t make the distance. There’s money on it to place, though.”

Another, a lustreless tan, followed. Its jockey looked nervously at the shrew.

“He’ll have to be quick, when it’s caught,” the serjeant said, chuckling. “He knows he’s on the slowest roach in the race. Bet he tried to get out of his contract.”

The Duke’s Roachmaster Extraordinary appeared now, leading Magnificence, the stunning dark crimson elytra with their silver inlays gleaming in the sun and the roachifers in their formal livery. It stopped, had to be prodded on, lifted one leg and twitched it. Its elytra lifted as far as possible, and the gauzy wings fluttered; its head jerked from side to side. The jockey, also in the Duke’s livery, played with the lines.

“They’re makin’ it do that, to scare bettors off and get good odds,” someone said from behind Petry.

“I dunno…” said someone else. “Looks poorly to me, it does.”

The serjeant’s fist tightened on Petry’s collar; he said nothing.

The fifth roach, a light brown with green stripes merely painted on, not incised, skittered past the shrew’s cage, half-dragging its roachifers.

Now, in the starting chutes, the roaches waved their antennae frantically and tried to lunge ahead, but each had a stout roachifer hauling on each leg. When the starter dropped his flag, the roachifers released their grips, and two hundred paces back, the shrew’s keepers released the shrew.

The crowd roared. The Harbormaster’s roach shot into the lead, closely followed by Arresting. Magnificence, though equal with Arresting at first, quickly veered to the outside, rubbing against the rail like a hog scratching an itch, despite its jockey’s frantic work on the winches. It was running fast, but a longer distance than the others. By the time the jockey was able to steer it back to the middle of the track, it was last, and the shrew was chittering a bare length behind. Thoroughly frightened, it raced ahead, catching up with the last roach, the dull tan one, and then passing the next before the next turn. Down the backstretch, the Harbormaster’s roach faded, leaving Arresting in the lead. Magnificence continued to gain, passing the Harbormaster’s roach, but even at a distance Petry could see that Arresting had the smoother stride, wasting no energy on popping its elytra. It was also clear that Arresting had more speed in hand, for it flattened out as Magnificence came alongside, opening a lead again. Magnificence challenged again, as they neared the far turn.

Neck and neck the two roaches ran, legs scuttling so fast they were nearly invisible. First the red and then the gold would get a lead. Far behind, the other three roaches were clearly outmatched, and the shrew snatched a leg off the last as it chased the next. The jockey leapt clear and ran for the protection of the inside rail — and made it, somewhat to the disappointment of the infield crowd.

Petry watched all this with interest, as the serjeant’s grip never loosened and he was keenly aware what fate awaited him if Arresting should lose. He had done all that the serjeant had asked of him but that would not be enough to save him. And yet, there in the merchants’ box was his present employer, who would be equally wroth if Magnificence lost. Never mind that Herimar had no idea it was Petry’s doing; he would be angry enough to make Petry’s life hell anyway.

“Get him away,” the serjeant muttered, over Petry’s head. “Get him away from that beast—”

“The shrew, sir?” Petry said. “He’s well ahead—”

“No, you fool! Away from Magnificence! It’s not good to be too close—”

Down the stretch they came now, with Arresting, on the rail, pulling slowly ahead…a handspan, an armspan. Magnificence’s jockey leaned forward, urging him on…when suddenly a glittering cloud lifted from Arresting and settled on Magnificence. The jockey on Magnificence waved his arms like a man threatened by a swarm of bees and nearly fell off.

“May all the devils in all the hells take him!” the serjeant said. “We warned him!”

“Warned who?” Petry said. “What happened?” But before the serjeant could speak, he knew. The cuttlemites, transferred to Arresting, had smelled their born-host nearby, his smell stronger for the race he’d been running and the accumulation of secretions, and transferred back. In an instant, they seemed to disappear, diving into the great beast’s crevices to groom him. Magnificence slowed and stopped as Arresting raced on and crossed the finish line; despite all his jockey could do, he crouched low to the track, antennae outspread. Petry imagined the relief the roach was feeling…all those itches scratched, expertly at once, as blissful comfort overrode fear. But now the Harbormaster’s roach, only slightly ahead of the shrew but far ahead of the two roaches the shrew had crippled, scuttled past Magnificence. Too late, the champion sensed the danger; too late it gathered its slender legs and tried to run…too late and too slow.

The crowd’s cheers for the winner died away as they watched the unthinkable…the Duke’s renowned racing roach losing leg after leg to the shrew; the jockey’s brave attempt to fight it off, until the shrew, annoyed, snapped at the man and bit off his leg. Though a dozen men with weapons ran out to save the jockey, he died before a healer could be found, and the great roach was eaten entire. The Duke’s Roachkeeper Extraordinary had flung his feathered hat on the ground and was jumping up and down on it, screaming; the roachifers huddled together, wailing.

“Well,” the serjeant said, loosening his grip at last. “As I said, boy, it’s time to cut your losses with Herimar and consider other opportunities. If you came to us, the work’s no harder and you might have that chance to become a watchman, when you’ve got some growth on you.”

And when he did not grow, they would begin to wonder why, and when they found out…

Petry fixed a bright smile on his face. “Could I really? But I need to pick up my things at Master Herimar’s, before—”

“Before he comes to himself and takes a billet to everyone,” the serjeant said. “Sure, then. Go on. I’m stuck here — no odds taken that Roachkeeper’s going to enter a formal protest, for all the good it’ll do him. He can’t prove anything. Come by the watch-house after sundown…and here’s a few coppers for you in earnest of the offer. No stealing purses, now…” He counted out five copper slugs.

“No, sir! I wouldn’t think of it.” Petry took the coppers then turned and elbowed his way through the crowd. Not enough for a stake, not enough for a pillow dance or even a good meal, but more than he’d had since Emeraldine ran off with his entire stash. And…neither Herimar nor the serjeant were in their usual places.

He might be able to diddle them both. It was time for him to leave the place anyway — one year without growing could happen to any young boy, but two was pushing it, and anyway he’d like to be someplace he didn’t depend on a magic depilatory to maintain his appearance.

Sure enough, all the watch were out on the streets, leaving the watch-house locked but unguarded. Locked, but not impregnable to a boy-sized man with the right experience. There in a drawer of the serjeant’s desk was the velvet purse and its jingling contents. Petry tucked that away in his vest pocket, scratched Herimar’s initials on one of the wooden house-tokens and dropped it on the floor, nudging it under the serjeant’s desk next to the lock-box. He scratched around the lock, as if trying to pick it, but left it locked. Then he relocked the watch house, and made his way to the Bilge & Belly.

The main room bustled with those returning from the race, downing jugs of ale as they told each other what they’d seen at the top of their lungs. Serving wenches rushed back and forth and half the professional ladies of pleasure from Aunt Meridel’s Treasure House were there, too, including Emeraldine, the cause of all his recent troubles.

Herimar, however, was missing. Arguing with the bookmakers about the extent of his losses, no doubt, for all the good it would do him. With any luck, he would quarrel with the Roachkeeper Extraordinary and be gone for hours.

Petry slipped into Herimar’s private apartment and left the purse, minus two of the gold coins, under his mattress. Then upstairs, to the Roachkeeper’s room, where he found, as expected, that the man had hidden a stash of coins in his chamberpot. And he’d marked them in the usual amateurish way, scratching his initials into the space between the Prince’s head and the motto. Easy enough to rub out, but Petry had a better idea. He took them all but one, tying half of them into a rag so they wouldn’t jingle, and put them down the back of his vest, under his shirt, with a string. That one, a silver, he held in his hand. The other half joined his earlier stash, inside his vest.

Downstairs again, with a chamberpot in each hand as if he were working, he looked to see if Herimar had returned. Not yet…very good. The rag with the Roachkeeper’s coins in it went under Herimar’s pillow; Petry came out of Herimar’s rooms with three chamberpots, just in case anyone noticed where he’d been, and out the back door to empty them in the pit. While appearing to scrub out the chamberpots, he scoured off the Roachkeeper’s initials from the coins he’d kept and then dirtied them in the quickest way, so they weren’t too shiny.

Still the Roachkeeper did not return; he imagined the man and his roachifers arguing with the serjeant, and smiled. Nor had Herimar returned. Petry’s smile widened. He didn’t need much more time…back inside, he slipped the Roachkeeper’s marked silver into Emeraldine’s sleeve-pocket while she had her tongue down some wormiger’s throat, then made his way to the stable and retrieved his pot of depilatory.

Now to the Duke’s, to apply for the job of fool. He sauntered through the town’s market square, stopping to buy himself a fruit pasty for the journey, trade the jar of depilatory for one guaranteed to speed hair growth, and fill the empty potion bottle from a dyer’s pot, then strolled out the unguarded west gate. When the thefts were discovered and he wasn’t around, someone might try to blame him — but the house-token should result in a search of Herimar’s — where the evidence he’d planted should point to Herimar — his greed and his need both being public knowledge. If not, Petry the boy would soon cease to exist anyway.

By the time the Roachkeeper Extraordinary and his roachifers dared return to the Duke’s court, only to be summarily dismissed, a very hairy dwarf known to that noble lord as Otokar Petrosky might be seen capering about the Duke’s hall each night in motley and a belled cap. With his hair dyed blue and done up in ribboned plaits, and his long braided beard dyed red with a bell on the end for the Duke to pull, he resembled in no way the beardless skinny orphan boy from the Bilge & Belly, and his short stature was in no wise a hindrance to his other ambitions…since not all of him was short.