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Chapter Ten

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“How long a head start does he have?” Indrajit asked.

“How long were we standing out there?” Fix panted as he ran. “I wasn’t completely lucid the whole time.”

“I . . . I’m not sure. Not long. Twenty minutes?”

They followed Munahim, who ran with his nose to the ground.

“You know,” Fix said, puffing, “if not for the assassins’ attack, we’d have been standing around another two hours before we noticed Avchat was gone.”

Munahim had led them to the back of the alley behind the forger’s kiosk, and then turned a sharp right at the base of the city wall. He’d run uphill, then slowed and become more tentative as he picked his way across a busy street, weaving between two oxen pulling on a cart and a herd of long-necked sheep, and then broke into a run again, down a zigzagging flight of stairs.

“When we catch Avchat, I shall express my gratitude to the House of Knives in an invocation.”

“Thanking . . . the fish mother.”

“If you like.” Indrajit turned on Munahim’s heels, cutting across a triangular plaza toward a darkened arch.

Passing a well in the center of the plaza, Indrajit tossed the Yuchaks’ scimitars in.

“He’s headed to the Dregs,” Fix said. “He must have gone immediately out the back door and run.”

“Speaking of the House of Knives,” Indrajit said, “who wants you dead?”

“Are you certain I’m the target?” Fix asked.

“Not certain, no. But doesn’t it seem likely? Twice, this fellow with the blowgun has appeared, and both times fired on you. Now we find out he’s with the House of Knives.” They plunged into shadow, following Munahim up a roofed flight of stairs. Ahead, out the stairs’ exit, he could see the gate into the Dregs. “Does the House of Knives count as one of the Gray Houses?”

“The way I heard it,” Fix said, “the first Lord Knife was a servant of the last Emperor of Kish.”

“You mean, along with the first Lord Chamberlain, the first Lord Archer, Lord Farrier, Lord Stargazer, and so on.”

“Yes. Though I don’t know what servant he was. ‘Knife’ isn’t a servant. But maybe a bodyguard or something.”

“So there’s a Lord Knife today,” Indrajit said. “And he’s not one of the seven Lords of Kish, or one of the seven Gray Lords. He’s number fifteen.”

“Yes, counting like that. Though there are plenty of other people who call themselves Lord Something-or-Other.”

“Priests and ambassadors.”

“Scholars. Merchants.”

“Really, the Lord Knife feels like the eighth Gray Lord, doesn’t he?”

“I don’t know.” Fix was red in the face and breathing heavy. “The Lord Chamberlain sometimes acts to kill people without any warrant, and in secret. How is the Lord Knife different?”

“Because he takes money for it?”

“So does the Lord Chamberlain. Or the Lord Farrier, or whoever has the contract for constabulary. He takes money, and he hires jobbers to break heads and sometimes kill people.”

“Okay, but the Lord Knife doesn’t buy contracts through the Auction House.” Indrajit chuckled, feeling he had finally put his finger on an important distinction.

“Yes . . .” Fix said slowly. “Yes, I think that’s true.”

“Is it possible,” Indrajit asked, “that the tradition that the Lord Knife was originally one of the servants of the Emperor might mean that he was one of the original seven?”

Fix snorted like a horse in water. “One of the Lords of Kish, and also head of the assassins’ guild? Doesn’t that seem like a lot of power?”

“I’m not saying it’s a good idea,” Indrajit said. “I’m asking if it’s possible.”

Munahim crossed through the gate into the Dregs and soon turned down a narrow street into a small plaza. The air was thick with the bitter smoke of yip and the sweet, cake-like scent of blue loaf. The walls of the surrounding buildings all seemed to lean inward, as if the plaza were sinking into the earth and dragging the neighborhood with it. Yip smoke dripped from the windows and crawled up the walls and seemed to ooze from the very bark of the scraggly goblin-trees clinging to the cracks in the ancient pavement. Men stood in twos and threes at every exit from the plaza. Indrajit blinked.

The men were all cats, standing on their hind legs. Wearing kilts and tunics or breastplates, armed with long knives and occasionally crossbows, but cats. Several snarled as the Protagonists passed. One held a four-limbed creature impaled on a stick, uncooked, and tore at it with his teeth.

And growled at Indrajit.

Indrajit avoided looking too closely at what the creature was.

“Watch out,” Fix said.

“You be careful, too.”

“No, Huachao. That’s the name of these people who look like cats. Huachao. I’d spell it for you, but what would be the point?”

“I’d stop listening as soon as you said ‘the first letter is wuh.’ I guess the Huachao live here?”

“This is the Armpit,” Fix said. “Famous as a place to buy, sell, and consume narcotics and other drugs.”

“I smell the yip.”

“Also the blue loaf, a little.” Fix nodded, his movements still slow. “You don’t smell the yao or the yetzel leaf, but they are also undoubtedly here.”

“And the Huachao?”

“As I understand it, they are one big clan. And they operate like a jobber company. So someone has them watching this place.”

“Not subtle, as sentinels go. But fearsome.”

Munahim stopped at the door of a narrow building of yellow clay bricks. Black mildew and unidentifiable green and blue blotches mottled the doorframe. Ironmongery suggested that a door had once hung here, but it was nowhere in evidence, and the hinges were all twisted and snapped. Within, glass shards lay on the floor. Two men crouched on the floor in the visible front room, one sucking smoke from a bowl and the other sipping from a clay bottle.

A white-furred Huachao with red-tipped ears and orange fur on his shoulders leaned against the wall beside the doorway. He wore a studded leather breastplate and skirt and had a curved sword belted to his waste. He peeled back his lips to reveal sharp, white teeth. Was that a smile? He eyed Munahim and Munahim glared back, showing his own teeth, neither backing down or moving a muscle.

“We’re here to meet a friend,” Indrajit said to the Huachao. “Just came in a few minutes ago.”

“A few seconds ago,” Munahim growled. “The pavement is warm from his sandal.”

“Right.” Indrajit took a handful of coins—sesterces and a chriso—and passed them to the Huachao. “We won’t cause trouble.”

The cat-man purred and looked away.

Within, a front entry room gave way to a narrow hall with an ascending staircase that doubled back on itself twice, rising to higher floors. “Upstairs,” Munahim whispered.

Indrajit drew his sword and the others followed suit. Munahim led them up the steps to the second story, then up to the third story, and then to a closed door near the back of the building. He sniffed at the floor outside the door and at the door handle, then listened at the door, then finally held up three fingers.

Three men inside. Perfect.

Indrajit looked to Fix. Fix’s color didn’t seem right—he was too pale, and his face was sweating. But his jaw was set, he had a falchion in one hand and an ax in the other, and he nodded.

Indrajit kicked down the door.

Inside, Danel Avchat stood beside a table. The stolen map was spread across the table, and two men stood on the other side. One was a scaly, four-legged Shamb, who was counting out coins from a purse in his hand. The other was a tall but solid Ildarian; the left half of his face was a mask of burn scars, and his left eye was sealed shut with scar tissue. The Ildarian wore a scale hauberk, and he and the Shamb each had a sword.

Both wore bright silk scarves around their necks—the Ildarian’s blue, the Shamb’s a red that matched his skin.

Indrajit charged the table. He intended to slam it into the two strangers and pin them to the wall, but he had not reckoned with the size of the Shamb, or the Ildarian’s strength. Indrajit roared and pushed the table, the Shamb didn’t budge, and then the Shamb and the Ildarian pushed back, knocking Indrajit into the wall.

He dropped Vacho.

The map, dislodged by the violence of the sudden motion, rolled up and soared across the room at knee height like a low-flying sorcerer’s carpet.

Coins scattered across the table and the floor. Avchat shrieked and dove for the money.

The Shamb groped across the table and grabbed Indrajit by the throat with both hands. His leverage wasn’t good, but the Shamb’s arm strength was proportional to the size of its body, which was overall twice the size of Indrajit. Indrajit gasped and choked.

Then Munahim rushed into the fight. He leaped and planted one booted foot on the Shamb’s back, which stretched parallel to the floor, framed by legs at the four corners, a torso at one end and a long, lizardlike tail at the other. The Ildarian had his sword half out of its sheath, but he had been fighting his way forward to attack Indrajit, so he now abandoned the effort to arm himself and turned to catch Munahim’s charge.

Munahim slammed the Ildarian in the face with a shoulder. His forward motion took both of them through a window, its glass long removed, and out of Indrajit’s sight.

Indrajit heard a heavy thud through the window, and then the sounds of scraping feet and the meaty symphony of knuckles cracking into jaws and abdomens.

The Shamb cast a distracted look over its shoulder toward the noise, and Fix attacked. He crouched and came up under the table. The edge of the table knocked Indrajit’s chin and hurled him against the wall again, but it also tore him free of the Shamb’s grip. The table struck both the Shamb’s elbows and the Shamb screamed in pain, a sound like the piping of a teakettle.

Avchat scooped up every coin he could as he staggered pell-mell across the room, finally snatching the map. The room spun about Indrajit’s head. He saw Fix attacking the Shamb in his peripheral vision, but he staggered into the doorway.

He saw the head of a Huachao climbing the stairs at a rapid pace.

He slammed the door just before Avchat could get through. He had to grab twice, his vision was so disordered, but he finally got the forger by the neck and tore the map from his hands.

The Shamb was on the floor, dead.

“Huachao are coming,” Indrajit said. “Help me block the door.”

Fix turned the table over and jammed it sideways under the door handle with one-handed help from Indrajit. It would hold, but not for long. Avchat ran to the window, only to meet Munahim climbing back in.

“Where did the Ildarian go?” Indrajit asked.

“He ran,” Munahim said. “I let him. Should I have shot him in the buttock?”

Avchat shrieked.

“Come with us.” Indrajit dragged the forger out the window and down onto the roof of the adjacent, shorter building. From there they crossed to a second building, circling around a sagging patch of the rooftop and a second patch that had already collapsed. As they were dropping to a still lower rooftop, preparatory to lowering themselves to the ground, Indrajit looked back. Two Huachao glared at him from the window he’d left.

He thought he could hear them hissing, but it was probably his imagination.

“You’re really going to regret this!” Avchat was trembling as they dragged him back into the Spill.

“Why is that?” Indrajit asked. “Because you outnumber us one to three? Or because your cause is just? Are you giving us fair warning that the gods will avenge you? You stole our map fair and square, so we have no right to take it back from you? Or are you going to tell on us to someone?”

“Those men were buying the map from me,” Avchat said.

“You were selling them our map, which you stole,” Indrajit said again.

“Which you stole in the first place!”

“What makes you think that?” Fix asked.

“The Graykin written all over it,” the forger said. “The fact that the borders outlined on this map mark the territories of the seven Gray Lords.”

Indrajit shrugged. “You were trying to sell our map,” he said again.

“To Uthnar Roberts’s men,” Avchat said.

Indrajit stared at him. “Who is that?”

“Uthnar Roberts. The Silksteppers. Gray Lord of half the Crown.”

“I let his man go,” Munahim said. “He should appreciate the act of mercy.”

“You let his brother go,” Avchat said. “Tully Roberts. But you killed his Shamb, and now they know you have this map.”

“So what?” Fix said. “This is ridiculous. Why would they be interested? Why would anyone chase after this map? Surely the Gray Lords all know their own boundaries.”

Avchat stared at Fix and then laughed, a reedy, frightened sound. “You don’t know, do you?”

“I am deprived of sleep, under a deadline, and fearful for the life of the woman I love,” Fix said. “Also, I have been poisoned. Is that the right word? Injected with venom. This is not a good way to talk to me today, forger.”

Avchat stared at the cobblestones. “I will make your copies. And I’ll show you what you don’t know about this map. For seventy Imperials.”

“Twenty,” Indrajit said, before Fix could agree. “And we let you live.”

They returned to the wooden kiosk to retrieve paper and inks, but Avchat was afraid Roberts’s men would come looking for him there and wanted to do the work somewhere else. Fix found an inn at the back of a winding alley two streets away, where the Grokonk Third at the front desk was willing to rent them a room for six hours.

The room contained a wooden chair, a table with lit lamp, pitcher, and bowl, and a sagging bed. It also had metal rings bracketed to the wall; the scraping pattern on the lower half of the rings suggested that sometimes, someone was chained to them.

They sat Avchat at the table. Munahim stood at the door and Indrajit watched from beside the single window, from which he could see the table clearly. Outside, the long winter night had come. Torches and lamps still lit the larger streets, but the alleyways had become black, frozen chasms cutting through an urban tundra.

“First,” Indrajit said, “what are we missing? What’s so special about this map?”

“I am going to hold the lamp near the map,” Avchat said. “I will not burn the map.”

“You die if you do,” Fix said calmly.

Avchat held the lamp up to the map. Where the lamp was close to the paper and warmed it, new lines appeared, overlaying the old. They showed an irregular lattice, a demented spiderweb, every place he heated the map. Alongside the pattern of lines were additional characters of the same sort as visibly graced the page.

“How did you know that was there?” Fix asked.

“When you showed me the map,” Avchat said, “I . . . invited you to give me some privacy.”

“Tricked us into leaving you alone,” Indrajit translated.

“And I tried a couple of standard tests to see if there were invisible inks on the map,” Avchat continued. “Which, as you can see, there are. You have to admit, it’s a map made by one of the Gray Lords. The invisible ink seems a little obvious.”

It didn’t seem at all obvious to Indrajit. He exchanged baffled glances with Munahim.

Fix sighed. “It’s a map of the Undersook.”

“I can’t read all the characters,” Avchat said, “but the map is bigger than the Undersook. I think it’s a guide to getting around Underkish. Not a complete map, a complete map of the ruins beneath this city would run to many, many pages and require vertical cross-sections. It would be a book. But I think, with this map, you could get around. Travel underground basically from anywhere in the city to anywhere else.”

The Protagonists sat in stunned silence for a minute.

“The Sookwalkers must be especially knowledgeable about the underground passages,” Indrajit said.

“We already knew that the merchants of the Paper Sook used some of those passages to move around unseen,” Fix continued. “It stands to reason that the thieves who prey on those merchants would have a strong incentive to get to know the passages even better.”

“So Zac Betel wants this map because he would like to know the tunnels like the Sookwalkers do,” Indrajit said. “And now the . . . Silksteppers? Roberts’s men. They know we have it, too. Dare we hope they will leave us alone?”

“They were going to pay me two hundred Imperials,” Avchat said.

“So let’s assume no, they will not leave us alone.” Indrajit sighed. “And have we perhaps angered the Huachao by causing a disturbance after we said we wouldn’t?”

“We can avoid the Armpit,” Munahim said. “Avoid the Dregs.”

“Good idea,” Fix said.

“And, of course,” Indrajit said, “there’s the House of Knives. Have I left anyone out? Have we angered the Selfless of Salish-Bozar the White without my noticing? Has the Collegium Arcanum decided that we’re a threat to the city?”

“It sounds like the complete list to me,” Munahim said. “For today. We have older enemies, of course.”

“Frozen hells, Fix,” Indrajit said. “Is she worth it?”

Fix sat on the bed and buried his face in his hands. “As a real person?” he asked. “As a woman, as a flesh-and-blood lover? I don’t know. But love is worth it, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Indrajit said at once. “Love is worth it.”

“You two sleep,” Munahim said. “I’ll watch the forger.”

“You can call me the ‘scribe,’” Avchat said.

“We’ll take turns sleeping,” Indrajit said. “Fix first. Avchat, do you have the materials here to make invisible ink? I want to give Zac Betel his money’s worth.”

“I do if you can get me drogger’s milk,” Avchat said. “Or camel’s will do, in a pinch.”


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