Derog stepped forward, grabbed the boy by his neck, and jerked him up with one hand. The boy’s head lolled.
“I can get a healer . . .” Lasa murmured.
“It wouldn’t do any good,” Derog said. “He’s cold. He’s been dead for at least three hours.”
Oh fuck, oh god, oh god, oh god, oh god. . . .
Derog pulled the boy’s shirt up. “You stabbed him in the heart. A clean, quick kill. Congratulations, nephew. What a feat.”
He let go and the body crumpled to the floor, splashing into the blood.
The kids stood frozen. Not a single gasp. Nobody cried. They just went immobile like statues, their faces blank, except for the other boy, who glared at Derog with blatant hatred.
Derog pulled a rag off the bunk bed’s rail and wiped his hands. “You killed him, and you didn’t tell anyone for three hours. Do you think I am stupid, Talpot? Do I strike you as a man of limited intelligence?”
“No, terr.” Talpot bowed his head.
“I promised your mother that I would take care of you. That’s the only reason you’re not bleeding out on the floor next to him.”
Talpot stayed immobile, like a statue.
“You owe me a boy,” Derog said. “And byboy, I don’t mean one you snatch in front of his parents and the entire street, so I’ll have a city-wide panic with the guards breathing down my neck and have to suspend all deliveries for weeks. I mean a boy quietly obtained; a boy of good quality. Do you understand me?”
Talpot unhinged his jaw. “Yes, terr.”
Lasa was staring at me with single-minded intensity. I must’ve broken character somehow and now he was watching me like a hawk, waiting for me to stumble. My life was hanging by a thread. There were five children in this room. If I died now, nobody would get out.
I walked forward, picked up the rag Derog had dropped, knelt in front of the boy’s body, and put the rag onto the blood, gathering it like it was spilled water.
“What are you doing, Maggie?” Derog asked.
I looked up at him. “Mess.”
“That’s right,” Derog said. “It is a mess, isn’t it? A slow-wit understands, Talpot, yet my only nephew doesn’t. Bring the girl a bucket of water and get the body out of here.”
Talpot stomped away. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Lasa. The suspicion had melted from his face, and he was making notations in his book.
I went back to mopping up the blood. It was cold. Cold and sticky on my fingers.
CHAPTER8
The blood refused to come out. I scrubbed and scrubbed, but the stain had settled into the grout between the stones. I would need bleach. Did they even have bleach in Rellas?
The horror of what had happened loomed in my mind, like a terrifying dark ghost that bent over me, watching me scrub the grout. Falling apart to deal with it wasn’t an option, so I ignored it and kept scrubbing with a blank look on my face.
The younger kids had started crying the minute the door leading upstairs closed behind Derog. The older teenage girl tried to calm them down, then another man came down the stairs, told them to shut up, dropped into a large chair in the corner, and propped his feet in beat-up boots on an old wooden trunk. He was about Talpot’s age, but where Talpot was thick, this guy was leaner, with a face that reminded you of a weasel, and skin so pale it was slightly green. His longish brown hair was pulled away into a sparse ponytail, and the jerkin he wore over his bare chest had burned patches on it.
I hadn’t counted on the kids being watched. That altered things.
The oldest girl led the three younger children to the latrine, then brought them back. The boy crawled onto his bunk and sat there, watching the weasel-face. He was eleven or twelve, thin, small, with dark tan skin, short brown hair, and very dark eyes. From where I knelt on the floor, his irises looked almost black.
I kept scrubbing.
Derog and his revolting crew showed up in the second book, in one of the later chapters. A talented young thief who went by River Fog traveled to Kair Toren at the request of a prominent noble family. They hired him to steal a child from Derog. It was a particular child, and Derog had referred to her as a “custom order for a special customer.” The family had tried to purchase her, but the slavemonger refused to sell her even at a sky-high price, which meant whoever had hired him to obtain the child in the first place had to be powerful enough to scare him.
A lot of that chapter revolved around River Fog scouting the house and remembering all the terrible shit that happened there, because years ago, he, too, was one of the children sold through it. At some point he encountered Talpot on the street, and it took all of River Fog’s will not to murder him. He stopped only because it would jeopardize his job, and he took pride in being a thief who never failed. He could pick any lock, steal the object he wanted, and vanish without a trace.
In his reminiscing, River Fog also shared that he had once run into another of Derog’s child victims. The man, by then an adult, told him that he had loosened a board in the latrine and dug a hole through the wall into Derog’s escape tunnel. He worked on it for weeks, removing the board to work on his tunnel, then sliding it back in place until one night he realized that only a single stone stood between him and the escape. A good push would have knocked the stone free and opened the way to freedom, but he was exhausted, and it was almost morning. He decided to make his escape the next night. But during the day one of Derog’s roughnecks noticed the loose board and nailed it in place, never realizing there was a tunnel behind it.
