The House of Vendarin stank of wealth. Rafiq had learned to read houses before he learned to read letters. The eastern prayer room in the Citadel of the Sun had held old wool, lamp oil, and the faint sandalwood that clung to Seylim’s robes after dawn prayer. The guesthouse near the House of the Returning Light had been incense, damp stone, and pilgrims who had walked too far on blistered feet. Zeid’s chamber in Solymer, when illness held him, had been warmed linen, bitter herbs, and the cedar medicine chest Ruhullah packed with such severity that even the jars seemed capable of rebuke. The House of Vendarin gave him cinnamon, salt water, candle wax, new leather, old silver, and overripe fruit left too long on a sideboard because the master preferred the appearance of abundance to its use. It was a merchant’s display, arranged with care. It told visitors that the Vendarin family had been rich for three generations and intended, by the Light, by ink, and by other men’s debts, to remain rich for three more.
Rafiq had been in the house for four months and eleven days.
He had counted every one.
He had passed through contracts before he passed through chains. That was the first lesson of Lagora: a man could be bound in a counting room long before iron touched his wrists. The valuation roll had called him an eastern eunuch-attendant, age uncertain, trained in household order and private service, formerly attached to a foreign prince, present standing disputed. The debt assignment had moved his custody from one creditor to another while both parties argued over whether the original seizure had been lawful. The witness seal had been affixed by a notary who had never seen his face. The sale memorandum described him as surplus to obligation, as if he were a cask of oil after a feast.
He had been sold three times before he reached the House of Vendarin.
The first buyer had been a Rhomanian silk factor who wanted a servant able to read Jaludi and keep accounts in more than one tongue. Rafiq had been useful for two months, until the factor discovered that a palace eunuch could not be treated like a common counting-house clerk. Rafiq corrected the man’s inventory system without invitation, reordered his correspondence by danger rather than date, and informed a merchant from Qahirat that the factor’s prices for raw silk were, in the merchant’s own dialect, an insult to his grandmother’s loom.
The factor sold him within the week, complaining of insolence.
The second buyer was a Lagoran spice dealer who wanted display: a foreign eunuch to stand behind him at baths, feasts, and bargaining tables. He kept Rafiq for three months, during which Rafiq learned that the cinnamon was cut with ground date pits, the wife was in correspondence with a ship captain, and the eldest son was stealing from the household accounts.
He shared none of this. He simply performed every permitted duty with such exactness that the household began to fear him. A servant who never smiled, never gossiped, never flinched, and never made mistakes seemed to be waiting for something the household could not name.
The third buyer was Master Aldo Vendarin.
He was a man of middle years, broad in the belly and narrow in the mouth, with small pale eyes and a habit of touching things he intended to own. He had seen Rafiq in the marble hall of the Merchanters’ Exchange, where the spice dealer had brought him like a horse at sale, and had circled him twice before naming a price.
“You were a prince’s attendant,” Vendarin had said.
“I am Prince Zeid ibn Seylim’s attendant,” Rafiq had replied. “The word is present.”
Vendarin had smiled. “We shall see.”
He paid in gold, which was unusual and therefore insulting. Silver would have been purchase. Gold was theatre. Vendarin wanted Rafiq to know how much he had cost and how little that cost had mattered.
The House of Vendarin stood on three sides of a paved courtyard, with a loggia above and a dry fountain in the middle. The fountain had not worked for eleven years, according to the housekeeper, who explained this on Rafiq’s first day with the air of a woman who had long ago buried expectation. The family had been quarrelling with the guild of stonemasons over repair costs for a decade, and neither side would yield. So the fountain remained dry, an expensive hole around which servants carried water.
Rafiq learned the house within a week. Master Aldo’s wife was a nervous woman who spent most mornings in Saint Illyra’s chapel. His eldest daughter was betrothed to a wool merchant from the Albaric lands who had not visited in two years. His younger son was studying law in the schools at Spiren and wrote home chiefly to request money. The household itself was ruled by the housekeeper, the cook, two kitchen girls, a groom, a porter, and a procession of body-servants who never lasted more than a season.
Rafiq lasted because he had been trained to endure, though not to obey in the manner Vendarin wished.
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The tasks Vendarin assigned were ordinary enough if named plainly. Rafiq stood behind the master’s chair at meals, poured wine, changed plates, carried letters, attended him to the Exchange, and slept on a pallet outside the bedchamber so that water, lamp, cloak, or document might be fetched at any hour. He wore the Vendarin livery, green and yellow, cut in an old fashion that made every man in it look as if he had been upholstered by a miser.
None of this, by itself, was beyond service.
But Vendarin did not treat him as a servant.
He treated him as a trophy.
“This is the eunuch,” he would say to guests, gesturing with his cup. “Formerly attached to an infidel prince. A real prince, mind you, not one of our counts with three fields and a grievance. The Sultan’s own son. Look at him. The bearing. The silence. You cannot buy that in ordinary markets. Well, you can, if you know the proper notaries.”
The guests looked. Some with curiosity, some with pity, some with the avid stupidity of men who had never seen a eunuch and had imagined worse.
Rafiq stood motionless.
He had been looked at before by men more dangerous than Lagoran merchants. He had stood in the Hall of the Fountain while emirs and jurists disputed status and oath. He had walked through the killing box at the Azran Gate with Zeid beside him and his name on a treaty roll. He had held a knife in a companionway while armed men tried to seize his prince, and had killed because there had been no time for cleaner law.
He endured eyes. The false name was another matter.
“I cannot pronounce that,” Vendarin had said on the first day, when Rafiq gave his name. “We shall call you Sandro. Or Tino. Something a man may say without coughing.”
“My name is Rafiq.”
“Not in this house.”
Rafiq did not answer. He simply continued to give his name whenever Vendarin used another, until the merchant tired of the game and settled on “the eunuch” as a compromise. It was not a name, only a category.
He slept outside the bedchamber. He rose before dawn. He poured wine, folded cloth, carried letters, and spoke only when required. The kitchen girls made signs against evil when he passed. The groom refused to meet his eyes. The housekeeper, who had served the Vendarin family for thirty years and feared very little, told the cook that the eunuch had the stillness of a cat at a mouse hole, and she did not care to imagine the mouse.
The mouse appeared in the fourth month.
Vendarin had been drinking because a ship from Rhomanian waters had arrived with silk inferior to contract, the captain demanded payment anyway, and advocates had entered the matter, which always drove him to wine. By the end of supper he was flushed, sweating, and in a temper the servants recognized and avoided.
Rafiq did not avoid it. He stood behind the chair and waited.
“The baths,” Vendarin said. “The private chamber. The one with the mosaic. You will attend me. Not the bath-servant. You.”
“I am not trained for bath attendance.”
“You were a prince’s body-servant. You know how to wash a man.”
“I know how to attend a prince. That is not the same office.”
Vendarin turned in his chair. His small eyes were wet with wine and malice.
“You think you are too high for this. Because you once stood behind a prince, you are above standing behind a merchant.” He leaned close enough that Rafiq could smell wine, meat, and rotting fruit on his breath. “Your prince is caged in the mountains. No one is coming for you. You are mine. You will serve with the same grace you gave him, or I shall find a use for you that makes the baths seem mercy.”
Rafiq said nothing.
“Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“Yes, what?”
The room waited.
“Yes, master.”
The word tasted of copper.
He had never called anyone master but Seylim, and Seylim was dead, as he had learned from port gossip carried into the household kitchens, and Zeid was in a fortress, and no one had come.
He attended Vendarin at the baths. It was worse than he had expected. Not because of heat, steam, or the labour of washing a man who did not wish to be washed so much as displayed. It was worse because Vendarin talked. He talked while Rafiq worked, a low, continuous foulness about money, ships, women’s bodies, men’s bodies, eastern courts, eunuchs, sultans, and the uses a prince might have for a servant who could not betray him with a child.
Rafiq’s hands remained steady.
When the bath ended, he dressed Vendarin, walked behind him through the streets, returned to the house, and went to the kitchen. There he drank a cup of water very slowly while the cook and the kitchen girls watched from the far side of the room.
Vendarin’s household was rich in bitter things: medicine for the wife’s headaches, ratbane for the storerooms, tinctures for the daughter’s nerves, dried herbs from eastern markets, and preserved fruits kept long past prudence because abundance looked better when jars remained full. Rafiq chose ratbane from the warehouse chest. It was crude, painful, and near at hand. It would make the belly cramp, the throat burn, and the household blame wine, fish, or Providence until someone remembered a quieter possibility.
He waited four days.
He waited until the daughter’s betrothal letters distracted the women, until the younger son’s demand for money distracted the clerks, until Vendarin signed a contract with a Rhomanian factor and called for wine and preserved fruit to sweeten his mouth.
Rafiq brought the fruit himself.
He had mixed the powder with honey and spread it on a dried fig, dark and sweet enough to carry bitterness. Vendarin ate three slices before the fourth displeased him.
“This fruit has turned.”
“It is the same jar as yesterday.”
Vendarin ate the fourth because he disliked correction. Then he ate a fifth to prove he had not been corrected.
The sickness began two hours later.
He cramped, retched, clawed at his throat, and called for wife, confessor, mother, and physician in an order that became less dignified as the night lengthened. The physician arrived too late to do more than close his eyes and write that death had come by a seizure of the stomach after excess of wine and rich food.
By dawn, Vendarin was dead.
It might have ended there. The physician was old and had no appetite for inquiry. The widow was already calculating mourning cloth. The daughter’s betrothal had paused out of respect but not, one sensed, for long.
But the housekeeper remembered the figs. She remembered Rafiq in the kitchen, spoon in hand, face calm as always. Calm had troubled her before. Now it became evidence.
She went to the city officers.