Blood Ties by Pamela Freeman Page A

low enough down to have a reasonable rent. When Ash arrived, the counter had been drawn up and locked, so he knew that the rubies had arrived. He went in cautiously, whistling his identity code so that Hildie wouldn’t jump him as he came through the door. He didn’t see her as he entered, then felt her breath on his neck and spun around.
    “Gotcha!” she said, and laughed at him. “Ya shoulda waited till I whistled back, young’un.”
    He blushed. He’d never get the feel for this constant suspicion and caution. “At least I remembered to whistle.”
    “Aye,” she nodded, and showed him the knife in her hand. “Otherwise you’da been whistling through a new hole in your windpipe.”
    She smiled as she said it, and he wasn’t sure how true it was. She was probably just trying to make him feel even younger and stupider.
    The jeweler was examining the rubies before signing the receipt. She was a big woman, tall and solid, beginning to run to fat, with gray eyes and light brown hair plaited down her back. She wore blue trousers and black boots with a gray work smock — simple, inexpensive, misleading clothes — and showed a placid face to the world, although Ash knew she was considered one of the sharpest traders in the city. The ruby seller, a thin, sharp-nosed man with an enormous mustache, was fidgeting from one foot to the other, anxious to have the gems off his hands. If they were stolen before he got a receipt, it would be his loss, Ash knew.
    “Well, you’re a welcome sight,” Hildie said to him. “Better two sets of eyes and hands right now — we’s at the sharp moment now.” She grinned. “Even your eyes might be useful.”
    He rolled his eyes in acknowledgment of her right to tease him, but he kept his face to the door and his eyes on the street.
    “You’re to report to the town clerk at eight tomorrow,” he said, “for a meeting with some merchants from the Wind Cities.”
    “Why does the old fart need safeguarding from foreign merchants?”
    Ash shrugged, but the jeweler chipped in, looking up from the lens she had suspended over the tray of rubies. “Because last time they threatened to cut his balls off if he substituted second-grade iron ore for the top grade they’d paid for.”
    “Ah . . .” Hildie nodded wisely, “and he’s afeared they’ll really try it this time and find out he don’t have any, right?”
    They all laughed, even the nervous ruby seller.
    “All correct and accounted for,” the jeweler said.
    She packed the gems away into her strongbox and put it aside, then handed up a pouch of money.
    The mustachioed vendor accepted the pouch and pulled something from his pocket with a flourish, all his nervous energy released once the jewels were safely paid for. “Something special,” he said. “Unique.”
    He laid it out on the jeweler’s tray — a big cloak brooch that mimicked a shield in intricate metal- and enamelwork. Bronze wire turned like hearts, or maybe faces, around a central circle with three curving enamel —
What?
Ash wondered.
Claws, birds’ heads, scythes?
— coming out from the center. There was something about it that caught the eye. On one glance it looked calm, balanced, pretty; on another look it was packed with threatening shapes in a whirling dance. Unsettling.
    “It’s old,” Ash said, and moved to see it better.
    “Ancient,” the man said, smoothing one end of his mustache into a curling tip. “As old as the Domains.”
    “I deal in gemstones,” the jeweler said dismissively. “This isn’t even gold, it’s just bronze.”
    “They say —” The man paused dramatically. “That it belonged to Acton.”
    “And my grandmother’s still alive and dancing the hornpipe every night at the Drunken Sailor.”
    “No, really! I got it in the west, near where Acton’s people first came over the mountains. He gave it to some woman’s ancestor.”
    “Why?”
    The man shrugged. “Because she was a good shag, I guess. It was usually