The torches cast long shadows as we rushed through the dark streets of Thebes. I mumbled prayer after prayer, hoping Michali had made a mistake. Eudocia gone—against her will, if I were to guess—and Gil dead. In the past, there had been stretches of days when I hadn’t been sure if he was alive, but I’d never had someone tell me they’d seen his body. Michali had been frightened, and the bathhouse had been dark. Maybe he was wrong.
Pain pulsed in my left leg, but I ignored it. I had to find out, to see for myself. Aban kept pace with me, and Sebastie and Michali led the way. The doors were cracked when we arrived. Sebastie pushed them all the way open, and we rushed through. The anteroom looked almost normal. The ledger sat out, still open rather than carefully stored away. Gil’s wood-framed spectacles sat beside the book. When we moved to the apodyterium, torchlight revealed splatters of blood along the walls and pools of it gathering on the floor. It also showed two bodies, warriors by their dress. I recognized one. I’d escorted him from the bathhouse that morning. Had he come back for revenge? Or had his earlier visit been more about reconnaissance than about a free bath and a moment alone with an attractive woman?
Two more bodies lay in the tepidarium, including Gil’s. I handed my torch to Aban and knelt over my friend. No reaction came when I turned him from his stomach to his back. Blood covered most of his face and chest.
“Gil!” I put my head on his chest and almost wept with relief to hear his heart still beating. “He’s alive.”
I stumbled to my feet and grabbed a towel, then wet it in the pool. “Michali, find as much light as you can. Aban, see if any of the others are alive.”
Sebastie bent over Gil. “A gash on the forehead and a bump on the back of the crown.”
“Anything else?” I asked.
Sebastie scanned the rest of Gil’s body and accepted a candle from Michali. I wiped the blood from Gil’s face and neck. The cut on his forehead still bled, so I held the towel to it. Sebastie studied one of Gil’s hands. “Just the head and a few scrapes and bruises on his hands and wrists.”
Gil’s sword lay on the ground not far from him. Blood stained its tip. I looked around for my brother and saw him coming from the apodyterium. “That one is dead.” He pointed to the man by the pool. “So are the other two.”
“Then there is no one to question.” Sebastie turned Gil’s head to the side to get a better look at the swelling on the back of it. “I hope he wakes up with his memory intact.”
“How many did you see at the gate, Michali?” I asked.
“More than twelve. Less than twenty.”
“Were they all men?”
“All but Eudocia.”
“Soldiers?”
“As far as I could see. They all had swords, except her and the Venetian. Wore mail or brigandines or cuirasses. No surcoats though. I couldn’t tell where they were from.” Michali swallowed and looked at Gil. “It was so dark when I first came in. He didn’t answer me when I shook his arm, and there was so much blood. I thought he was dead.”
I took the towel off to check the bleeding. It hadn’t slowed much. “Someone should sew the wound up.”
“Antonina. I’ll go fetch her.” Michali ran off.
“Who is Antonina?” Sebastie asked.
“One of the attendants. Works in the afternoon and does the threading.”
“Wouldn’t a man be better for the job?” Aban asked.
“Antonina spends hours with threads every day.” Plucking hair from healthy skin was different from sewing up split skin, but I’d seen her embroidery—she was good with her hands, and that skill would transfer. Having Antonina help would give us the added benefit of discretion, should we want it. Until I knew more about what had happened, I wasn’t sure it was wise to involve any of the Florentine authorities. I kept my eyes away from my brother. His attitude toward women matched our father’s, so I knew exactly where it came from, but now wasn’t the time to argue about it.
Three men dead. Gil bleeding. Eudocia missing. She would never have left Gil by choice, especially not if he were bleeding and unconscious. Never once had she run away when he’d needed help. She’d been abducted.
“One of the men was here this morning,” I said. “We thought he was just a leech. Threw him out. I didn’t expect him to bring back friends to get his vengeance.”
Sebastie shook his head. “This was planned in advance, not thrown together by some hothead after you and Eudocia got the better of him.” He scanned the dead bodies. “Sounds like his visit this morning was preparation for the attack.”
I checked Gil’s wound again. Still bleeding but not quite as much as before. “Why would someone attack the bathhouse?”
“For Eudocia, it seems.” Sebastie sat back on the floor and looked at the damage.
His theory fit with what we saw and what Michali had told us. Gil would fight for his wife regardless of the odds, even when he couldn’t win.
“Who were they?” I’d thought the leech a Florentine, but he could have been from anywhere.
“I think we should ask the Venetians.”
I nodded, then cursed. Gil and Eudocia had followed the Venetians. They’d learned where they were staying, but they hadn’t passed their information on to me. It hadn’t seemed important to get the details at the time. I’d assumed they would be around to ask when I wanted to know.
Antonina lived nearby, and she and Michali arrived soon after he’d left to find her. Surprise showed in her wide eyes as she entered the tepidarium. “What happened?”
“We aren’t sure yet,” I told her. “But we think Eudocia was abducted.”
“Why would someone abduct Eudocia?” Despite all the hours Antonina had spent working with Eudocia, she knew little about her past.
Sebastie met my eyes and gave a little shake of his head.
We hadn’t talked about it much, even among longtime employees, because we’d feared this very type of thing—that someone would want to use her skills for their own ends. If offered a job, she would refuse. But not all of our old enemies would give her a choice—and we had many old enemies. Eleven years was a long time, but we’d stolen a city. That wasn’t something people forgot or forgave.
I forced a response out. “We don’t know, Antonina. That’s what we’re trying to figure out. Michali, when you saw her, was she tied or chained?”
“No. But I could tell something was wrong. It was just torchlight, but her eyes looked as if she’d been crying. And it looked like there was blood on her face.”
“Her blood?”
Michali shook his head. “It looked more like a spray.” He glanced around at the bodies. “If I were to guess, I’d say the blood came from one of these men.”
Eudocia had skill with the sword. If attacked, I imagined she would have fought at Gil’s side—until Gil fell and she was captured.
Antonina slipped silk thread through her needle and examined the wound on Gil’s forehead. She made a tsk. “Not quite as long as yours, Rasheed, but I imagine this will scar.”
Who cared about scars when only a while before I’d feared he was dead?
I held a candle in one hand and a torch in the other, trying to give Antonina as much light as possible without singeing her or her patient. Gil’s hand twitched as she put in the first suture. By the third, his lips pressed together.
“Michali, will you fetch the wine?” I asked. Gil might wake up soon, and when he did, he’d probably have a headache.
Aban sat on a bench, watching. He’d cooperated when we’d needed help. There wasn’t time to let differences in clothing and worship come between us, not when devastation had struck and death was stalking. But would he resent me more later because I’d kept him from his sleep and ordered him around to help a Christian?
Sebastie studied the dead men, examining their clothes and their wounds.
“Can you tell where they’re from?” I asked him.
“No. Western rather than Greek.”
“Catalan?” Most of our enemies were Catalan. “Venetian?” They’d wanted help earlier in the day. Maybe they’d decided to take it by force when we’d refused their offer of employment. The leech could have been in league with them—sent ahead to identify the correct target, then sent back when we’d refused the proposal Bertaldo and Querini had made.
Sebastie closed one of the dead men’s eyes. “Could be. Could be anyone else, for that matter.”
Antonina finished with Gil’s forehead. She took a clean towel and washed the wound with the wine Michali had brought. It resulted in another hand twitch, but Gil’s eyes stayed shut.
“What will you do now?” Aban asked.
I had no ready answer. We could try to track the group that had taken Eudocia, but they’d be difficult to follow in the dark, and the guards at the gates might not open the doors for us. They couldn’t keep us in if we were determined to escape—I’d gone over the walls of the Cadmea before—but they could delay us and prevent us from taking our horses. Gil might have information, if he woke up. Or the Venetians might, if we could find them. Better information would give us a better chance at a rescue. The odds were already against us ever finding her, but I had to try, had to hope.
I glanced at Michali. “Gil and Eudocia didn’t tell you where they followed the Venetians to, did they?”
“No.”
I swallowed back my disappointment and asked him my next question. “The Venetian you saw with the group that had Eudocia, could he have been in command of the group?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Another prisoner?” Sebastie asked.
Michali sighed. “I can’t be sure. It was dark, and I didn’t want them to notice me.”
“I don’t understand.” Aban folded his arms across his chest. “If someone wanted captives, wouldn’t it be easier to raid a village? Why come inside the Cadmea? Why leave him and take his wife?” Aban pointed to Gil. “And why steal her from here and a Venetian from some other place?”
Aban was my brother, but I wasn’t ready to tell him the details of our past. “I imagine they were both targeted. This wasn’t a random raid to gain captives for the slave markets.” I motioned to Gil. “Help me move him somewhere more comfortable.”
Aban took Gil’s legs, and I grabbed his shoulders. We took him out to the cushioned benches of the anteroom, and I sat beside my friend and rubbed a hand over my face.
“What should we do now?” Michali asked.
I leaned against the wall and glanced at Sebastie. “Will you help me track her?”
“Yes, but first, we should talk to the Venetians. They might know something that could help us.”
“I don’t know where to find them.”
“Then we will pray Gillen wakes up so he can tell us.”
In the meantime, I needed to get rid of the bodies. The Florentine officials who ran the town for Nerio Acioli might ask awkward questions about what had happened, and if they knew we’d had contact with the Venetians, it could cause trouble for us.
“Aban, will you help me with the bodies?”
He nodded.
“Antonina, Michali, I might be gone for a while, looking for Eudocia. Keep what happened tonight quiet, even among the other attendants. Can you clean up the mess and scrub away the blood? Do what you can tonight, then check again in the morning when the lighting is better.”
They both agreed.
“And I will sit with my nephew and pray.” Sebastie took my place on the bench.
Three bodies littered the bathhouse floor, and there was only Aban and myself to move them, so I borrowed a cart without asking. The wine merchant didn’t need it at this time of night anyway, and any bloodstains would look no different from the wine stains already coloring the wood. As we loaded the dead men, I looked closely at their clothing and weapons. The leech wore different clothing than the items I’d thrown out to him in the alley. If I had thrown a dagger into his chest that morning, might things have been different? Two of the dead men had nondescript swords, so I kept them. The third man’s sword was more unique—someone who knew him might recognize it—so I shoved it back into its sheath.
“Is this the type of thing that happens often in Greek bathhouses?” Aban asked as we hauled the last corpse out to the courtyard and threw him in the cart.
“No. This is a first for me.” I covered the bodies with a cloak, in case we ran into anyone else out this late. “You?”
“New to me. Back in Valencia, I left my body in the bathhouse.”
I was fairly sure that counted as a real conversation. Even if the subject was manslaughter and slain bodies, I would take it. Maybe there was hope for two brothers after all.