Burning Bright

“Good morning,” Damian Chrestil said, keeping his voice suitably subdued, and crossed to the sideboard to pour himself a cup of coffee from the intricate silver brewer. The coffee was cut half-and-half with milk from the Homestead Island farms—even the Chrestil-Brisch couldn’t afford to import coffee in bulk—and he added a toffee-colored crystal the size of his little fingernail from the sugar bowl. Sugar was expensive, too—most of the sugarwort crop went to the distilleries—but there was no point in being stingy this morning. He collected breakfast as well, a wedge of soft, mild cheese, a few thin, chewy slabs of docker’s bread, and a spoonful of sour preserved fruit. There was fish sausage as well, and a bowl filled with half a dozen hard-boiled eggs, their shells painted with swirls of dye, but he ignored them both, and seated himself opposite Bettis Chrestil. The sunlight, mercifully, was behind him; it streamed into the room, casting shadows across the polished and inlaid tabletop and onto the olive-and-gold paneling. The carnival scenes that filled the central medallion of each panel looked bleached in the strong light.

“Has anyone seen the weather?” Damian asked.

Bettis looked up from her board. “About what you’d expect, this time of year. There’s a depression to the southeast, but there’s no saying if it’ll strengthen, or come this way.”

Chrestillio said, “The street bookmakers are saying it’s at forty-to-one to hit at all, at any strength, but I hear that’s dropping.”

And the street bookies would know, Damian thought. They know as much and more than the weathermen, but then, they have more to lose. The canalli bet on the weather with the same passion that he himself played politics.

“I’m sorry I’m late,” a new voice said, and Damian looked up to see the last of his siblings standing in the doorway. She came fully into the room, a broad-shouldered, broad-hipped woman in the grey-green coveralls that anyone wore to visit the distillery, and a whiff of the mash came with her, a sour odor almost thick enough to taste. Damian winced, and Calligenia Chrestil-Brisch finished stripping out of the heavy coveralls and dropped them in the hallway outside the door. She closed the door behind her, leaving the clothes for a household cleaner, said, “I got caught up in some stuff at the plant.”

“Problems?” Chrestillio said, and Calligan Brisch shook her head.

“Not really. We were doing preliminary slow-down for Storm, and there was a minor hassle with one of the big vats. About what you’d expect, this time of year.”

Chrestillio nodded, satisfied, and Damian took a cautious sip of his coffee, trying to drown the last of the smell.

“Did you get that shipment in, Damiano?” Calligan went on, and turned to the sideboard. She filled a plate—a little of everything, cheese, sausage, bread, a couple of the eggs, a healthy spoonful of the preserved fruits—and came to take the final place at the table. Looking at her, at all of them, Damian was struck again by the resemblances between them. Not that they precisely looked alike, beyond a general similarity of coloring—Chrestillio and Calligan Brisch had both gotten their mother’s build, big, broad-shouldered people, while he and Bettis Chrestil took more after their slimmer, fine-boned father—but there was a certain something, the shape of the long nose and the quirk of the wide mouth, that marked them unmistakably as siblings. He shook himself out of the reverie, and made himself answer her question.

“Yes. There was some minor spoilage in one of the batches of red-carpet—TMN again.”

“I think we ought to cut ties with them,” Calligan Brisch said, and reached for a saltcellar. Bettis Chrestil slid one across to her, still not taking her eyes from the workboard.

“We probably should,” Damian agreed. “Unless they give us a real break on the next few batches.” And anyway, he added silently, they’ve served their purpose. I’ve got enough information on their codes to fake a shipment from them, and that will help the lachesi get through.

“What I’d like to know,” Chrestillio said, “is why the Republicans have been sniffing around our warehouses again.”

“Not here, surely,” Bettis said.

“No,” Chrestillio said.

“On Demeter, right?” Damian said, with all the innocence he could muster. “I think it was TMN they were after—another reason to drop them, I guess.”

“You heard about it, then?” Chrestillio asked.