Closed Don't Blink

[Seven Xu]

Seven had briefly hunched to collect one of the aforementioned discs and was turning it between his fingers as the whore stormed away. “Curious,” he smiled, and his red eyes drank the silvery tin. “Seems to me it’s nearly more effort to make these than it is to earn the real thing.”

The backroom door slammed shut. The din of the formerly shocked tavern resumed, two dozen muttering voices droning over the clinking of glass and the scraping of leather soles and old wood. Seven pocketed and forgot the disc.

“We should go after him, yeah?” He posed the question on his own hesitance, dreading the prospect of chasing the small drunkard through East Street. Then, without waiting for the glass boy’s response, he breathed a nervous laugh and shouldered a path toward the tavern’s entranceway.

It needn’t be said that Seven wasn’t one to chase down a fight. One-hundred pounds soaking wet, the man was built for map-making and watching the sky, not brawling. Any drunkard with a smidgen of malintent could make quick work of him with little rebuke. It would have surprised his friends—had he managed to keep any, aside from Victor—to see the little widow shove purposefully through a growing crowd in the stink of East Street, throwing impatient looks over his shoulder when Monty’s staggered breaths fell too distant.

They found him at the dead-end of an alleyway.

All the purpose seemed to leave Seven’s face in an instant. He blinked vapidly. “Please,” he started, hands rising in a gesture of peace, “we’ll pay your whore. We just want you to do something for us.”

[Montaine]

‘Petch, shyke, petch, shyke, petch, shyke,’ Montaine muttered his mantra through his rasping, wheezing breathing as stumbled after Seven. More than once he lost sight of their diminutive quarry, barging his way drunkenly through the crowd, and on one occasion he panicked as his companion’s white hair popped out of view for a few ticks. He paused to catch his breath and manage to relocate the man entering into one of East Street’s many alleyways. This part of town was a maze and while it certainly didn’t compare to the shifting streets of Alvadas, one not paying attention to where they were going could easily lose their way. Montaine slipped between a couple of sailors and turned into the blind alley, pulling up alongside his client. Seven was saying something, negotiating or haggling or some such thing. The glassworker wasn’t particularly paying attention as spots had appeared in front of his eyes and refused to go away. His lungs hurt like shyke. He put an arm to the wall to support himself as he got his breath back. ‘Hey, I don’t owe you any money! You go and tell that bastard I don’t owe him anything, it was a favour, just a favour! I pay all my debts, I’m an honest man!’ Abatelli was scowling but his eyes were wide and he seemed jumpy. Monty coughed and tried to speak and though it was haggard he managed some words, ‘I doubt Brandy’d agree, Mister Abatelli. Now the old man, he’s a classy sort of fella, but from what I hear Missus Nadir ain’t so friendly, if you catch my drift. We’re not here to get money from you, Calbert sent us to get information on lenses, an’ how to make them properly,’ Abatelli paused in his jittering and squinted at the tired glassworker for a few ticks before finally saying, ‘You aren’t lying to me, are you boy? If Johann sent you then he knows what I want in return. My debt with him is paid, my favour for his. The old bastard’s held that dratted favour over my head for twelve years, but if I do this for you it’s gone, clear?’ after a round of affirmations and nods he turned to Seven, ‘And you can pay Brandy, since you so kindly offered. She’s a delightful girl, can do wonders with her tongue,’ he winked, You’re your friend is right, she’s also liable to have my legs broken if I try and go back there any time soon without her money,’

[Seven Xu]

“Charming,” Seven said, exchanging a pained look with Monty. The halfblood had little and less love for whores, despite his father’s disclosures of his mother. What love they could have had was smothered in jade and stank of treachery—after all, Zhao was a married man when Seven was conceived. Adulterer. Hypocrite. Seven’s face twisted with a brief sourness before he tipped his blood gaze downward again to regard the man.

“We need you to take us to your workshop,” he paused, “or your house. Brandy will be paid, by my word.”

A whitish hand gathered the glassworker, still sweating and heaving from his efforts, and the pair followed a sobering Abatelli from the alley and back into the street. Side by side Seven and Monty walked, the lens grinder keeping a stride ahead. “I must look a fool, to go through so much in order to stare through glass at the sky.” Seven’s arm left the brunette’s back when he looked well enough (relatively speaking) to walk on his own. That hand found his pocket, and within, the body warm tin disc.

Had he managed to finish his glass of brassy green swill, Seven may have shared his passion in his Lady’s stars as they filed out of East Street and headed down, dockward. Fortunately, he hadn’t.

“Here we are,” Abatelli rocked from one heel to the other. They’d stopped before a row of houses on a street even narrower than the last. All rentals, Seven figured, homes stacked on homes with little room left to breathe. Abatelli fumbled through deep pockets for a moment, grunted, and then opened his hovel’s unlocked door without help from a misplaced key ring. “Watch the floor.” And then with a laugh, one chubby-fingered hand shot up to slap Seven on his neck. “Don’t have a wife, you know, to clean up after me’self.”

Seven’s smile was brief and stiff, and he jerked his head in a gesture for Monty to enter first.

[Montaine]

‘I was under the impression that you rented a room at the Dirty Spoon, Mister Abatelli,’ Monty said as he entered the diminutive lens grinder’s humble abode. The place was not precisely clean. It seemed to fit well with what the glassworker already knew of their quarry. There were a number of empty mugs littering the corners of the room, taken, no doubt, during a drunken evening when the drink wasn’t finished but he had to head home. Gadger once told him that a significant portion of pub maintenance was replacing stolen mugs. Monty had taken it as jest, but from the small hoard Abatelli had collected, perhaps it wasn’t so silly an idea. ‘Oh aye, Spoon’s over there,’ came the grinder’s response, with a nod between Seven and Monty, through the open door, at the building across the narrow street. His little apartment didn’t have any windows, but the view from the door was of the back of a biggish bar. It hadn’t been immediately evident from behind, but upon closer inspection someone was bringing in several kegs through the rear entrance. ‘The front goes out onto East Street, but Carver, the bastard who owns the place, he holds the leases on most the houses down this stretch too. Nasty piece of work, but while I’m paying him for accommodation he’s hardly got any interest in me,’ Abatelli waddled over to his bed and wiped the sheet down with his hand, making a vain attempt to flatten out the creases and disguise the stains, ‘Can I get you a water? Or I can run across the street and get us all a round in, your treat of course,’ Monty almost accepted, but they were there on business, and the business needed to be done. He shook his head. ‘Alright, then let’s get down to it. What’ll it take for my debt to that old bastard Calbert to be paid, eh?’

[Seven Xu]

“Lenses,” Seven remarked, an almost cheerful lilt playing across the word. Then he added, “Just two. Enough to arm one telescope—a refractor, that is.” He’d toyed with a handful of telescopes and spyglasses at the Observatory back in Lhavit. Some even had mirrors. His favourite, however, had always been the big brass refractor that showed him the stars upside-down, but clearer than the upright images from others.

The halfblood had wasted no time in appraising the dark little cabin, ducking around Abatelli as the modest little man fumbled for the nearest working lantern. His eyes had little trouble navigating the mess. In fact, it felt better to be inside, rather than beneath the blinding sun.

“Two lenses for my telescope and your debts are paid, Mister Abatelli.”

In a valiant effort to reach the dingy window and freedom, a moth fluttered by. Seven plucked an empty mug from its berth, turned its bottom up, and captured the moth beneath it.

“If pleasin’ everyone were as easy as pleasin’ you, I’d be a wealthy man,” Abatelli’s laugh was as short-lived as the buoyant smile on Seven’s pale face. “Unfortunately, lads, my fingers are seizin’ up more as of late. Age, you know. I’m afraid I can’t do it. Ah, that, and I sold the ol’ grindin’ tools a while back. Man’s gotta eat.”

Or drink. Seven caught his tongue. He turned his red stare on Monty and knitted his brows together.