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our apartments, fists pressed against his eyes. Gilt-framed walls paneled in watered silk enclosed antique furniture displayed as carefully as any museum. We knew our status, did our family.
The dwarf maids had already found business elsewhere -- snickering no doubt through their tight-sewn lips -- while Bijaz, Father's household manager and my own tutor, paced behind his employer. Had the older dwarf not been boxed in early childhood to limit his growth, Bijaz would have been a large man. Instead he was merely powerful, with a mane of silver hair and beard, glittering gray eyes and sharp ears that missed little.
Father spun on his heel, advancing on Bijaz as if the dwarf were some vermin caught scuttling across the kitchen tiles. "Every last obol is leveraged, yes? There is nothing in the house accounts?"
"Sir," said Bijaz, his voice whistling shrill through the puckered opening between lips stitched shut in the formal and customary guarantee of trustworthy silence, "All is as you ordered."
"And against your advice," muttered Father, fist slapping against his palm. I drew my quilted silk sleeping robe tighter and pressed myself back against the library door, quiet as I could be. "And so it ends," Father said, his raged draining away as fast as it had mounted. "Fourteen generations of petty nobility in service of the City Imperishable, and now our fortunes are foundered upon my ambition."
Bijaz's fingers flickered close to his waist, the fingertalk of the City's Dwarven servants. Father nodded, then looked toward me in the shadows of the door. "Do not cower so, Jason," he said. "I will be charged as a debtor on account of the thousand-odd soul bottles in which I invested, but your mother's family fortunes may yet protect you."
As if Mother ever saw anything past her dressing table mirror, I thought, but dared not say aloud. She had never been worthy of Father's love. I was afraid I would not be either.
Less than a week later, my sisters and I prowled the damp cobb