Read Online The Curse-Maker by Kelli Stanley - Free Book Online Page B

offerings. Coins, secondhand silver, jewelry, whatever you had or whatever you could afford—ready-made bribes, if the goddess was willing. I give you this, you do that. Don’t forget to say please. Simple. The curses, though—I wasn’t sure how they worked. I’d always cursed people to their faces, and I never asked a god to do for me what I could do for myself.
    I approached a small stall. A thin man in a stained blue tunic looked at me with the eyes of a malnourished rat. I expected to see a tail.
    â€œWanna curse? Lose a robe? Somebody steal your wife?”
    I leaned over the termite-infested board he used as a counter and let him assess how much money I had. He licked his lips, as the eyes clicked over past asses into sestertii and maybe even denarii.
    â€œI can write you a good one. Court case, maybe. Make sure you win, make sure they swear to pay.”
    I leaned a little farther in, and I started to make him nervous. “Maybe you want a boy? Can’t get him interested? Got a love defixio, too, he’ll bend over faster than a—”
    â€œHow do these work?”
    That threw him off. He stared at me, at first with his mouth open. A fly flew dangerously close. Then the beady little eyes narrowed.
    â€œWhaddya mean? These here are defixiones. Curses.”
    â€œI gathered that. What’s the process? What do you do?”
    Now the eyes were darting back and forth, trying to find an angle, or maybe find out what my angle was. Then his mouth closed up tight.
    â€œI buy my lead fair and square. You ain’t goin’ t’ catch me sayin’ nothin’.”
    â€œI’m not saying you don’t. I just want to know what it is you do.”
    â€œI keep to the rules! I pay the temple! My lead’s all bought, I’m not one of these water-pipe thieves—you go down and talk to that one, he’s the one you’re looking for.”
    He started to gather up the odd pieces of roughly square or rectangular lead that were stacked on the board, then took out a tattered leaf tablet from underneath and stuck it under his tunic.
    â€œMy spells is good ones, and my writing’s good, too. And my lead!” He looked at me angrily and swept the rest of the metal pieces into a worn leather pouch.
    â€œYou go down there to them others. I’m closed.”
    With a twitch of his mouth, he scurried off to a dark hole he’d probably watch me from. I was left standing in front of a rotted board propped on two empty barrels, with a mildewed sailcloth sheet stretched above.
    Someone chuckled behind me. I turned to find another priest. This one looked a little ratlike, too, but better fed. “You can find more educated versions next to the inscription carver.”
    â€œI’m Julius Alpinius Classicianus Favonianus. I’m investigating the murder of Rufus Bibax.”
    He sucked his teeth thoughtfully. “Yes, I know.”
    I was starting to run out of patience. “Can you tell me how all this works?”
    â€œWell, as to how it works, I leave it to the goddess, but I can tell you how they run their business. Come with me.”
    He walked ahead, his toga dragging the dirty pavement. It wasn’t draped properly, and I noticed it was wet along the bottom. Not exactly an advertisement for clean and healthy Aquae Sulis.
    We stopped at the end of a row. A man in his late forties was hammering out a sheet of lead on a board. This one wasn’t rotten.
    The priest jerked a thumb at me. “He wants to know what curse-writers do, Peregrinus. He’s trying to find out about Bibax.”
    The scribe looked from the priest to me and then kept hammering.
    â€œDon’t know anything about him,” he said carefully, “but I’ll tell you what we do. All of us are a bit different, though we all use roughly the same curse books, and the materials are the same.”
    â€œCurse books? Are they like spell books?”
    The priest