“Everything?” Gwinvere asked. “Like you’ve done so well? My sister might have words about that.”

“Vonda’s dead because I didn’t,” Durzo said. He wouldn’t meet Gwinvere’s gaze. Out the window, night was just beginning to lose its hold on the city.

Looking at Durzo there, his hard, pockmarked face glowing yellow sorrow in the lamplight, Gwinvere softened. “So you fell in love, Durzo. Not even wetboys are immune. Love is a madness.”

“Love is failure. I lost everything because I failed.”

“And what do you do if Azoth fails?” Gwinvere asked.

“I let him die. Or I kill him.”

“You need him,” she said gently. “You told me yourself that he’ll call a ka’kari to you.”

Before Durzo could say anything, there was a knock at the door.

“Come,” Momma K said.

One of Gwinvere’s maids, obviously a former courtesan herself, now too old for the brothels, poked her head in the door. “There’s a boy to see you, milady. His name is Azoth.”

“Show him in,” Gwinvere said.

Durzo looked at her. “What the hell is he doing here?”

“I don’t know.” Gwinvere was amused. “I suppose that if he’s the kind of boy you can mold into a wetboy, he can’t be without certain resources.”

“Damn, I left him not three hours ago,” Durzo said.

“So?”

“So I told him I’d kill him if I saw him without proof. You know I can’t make idle threats.” Durzo sighed. “You might have been right, but it’s out of my hands.”

“He’s not here for you, Durzo. He’s here to see me. So why don’t you do your little shadow thing and disappear?”

“My little shadow thing?”

“Now, Durzo.”

The door opened and a bleeding, wretched boy was shown in. But even beat up as he was, Gwinvere would have picked him out from a thousand guild rats. This guild rat had fire in his eyes. He stood straight even though his face was abraded, his mouth and nose dribbling blood. He looked at her unabashedly, but was either young enough or smart enough that he looked at her eyes rather than at her cleavage.

“You see more than most, don’t you,” Momma K said. It wasn’t a question.

He didn’t even nod. He was too young to be mocking her tendency to state questions, so there was something else in that flat stare he was giving her.

Of course. “And you’ve seen something terrible, haven’t you?”

Azoth just looked at her with big eyes, trembling. He was a picture of the naked innocence that died every day in the Warrens. It stirred something in her that she’d thought long dead. Without so much as a word, she knew she could offer the boy a mother’s arms, a mother’s embrace, a safe place. She could give a refuge, even to this child of the Warrens, who’d probably never been held in his life. A soft look, a touch on his cheek, and a word, and he would collapse into her arms and cry.