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Chapter Nineteen

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Indrajit held the lamp in his left hand, keeping his right hand on Vacho’s hilt. Ahead of him, pushing into the shadow at each step, walked Yammilku. The Heru’s hands hung easily at his side and his shoulders looked relaxed. Indrajit didn’t feel relaxed. He worried Yammilku might have allies—Silksteppers or Sookwalkers or other corrupt Sootfaces—waiting in ambush. He worried Yammilku had agreed to bring him down here to kill him. He worried something bad had already befallen Fix and Munahim. He worried . . . 

He worried.

He wondered about Manko’s loyalties, and what the Gund thought its instructions were.

And what, for that matter, was Philastes telling the Gund? They continued to chatter away, croaks and groans and ribbits, punctuated with rattling laughter.

The crack in the knoll, hidden among the pipal and amalaki trees, twisted down and into the bowels of the city in the shape of a corkscrew. Near the entrance, the butts of yip and tobacco cigarettes, fruit rinds, cracked cups, and ratty wool blankets suggested casual use, but with a minute’s steep climbing, they stood on a brick floor. Ahead of them, a brick arch leaped right and left, a ribbon of orange-red suggesting a passageway beyond. To the right, shattered stairs descended.

Yammilku stopped. He looked down the stairs and along the passage.

“What’s wrong?” Indrajit asked, but the Heru didn’t answer him.

Manko groaned.

Yammilku whistled a series of notes that echoed off distant brick, returning tremulous and watery.

“You surely haven’t forgotten your way,” Indrajit murmured. “So something is wrong. Were you expecting to find someone here?”

“Shh.” Yammilku shook his head. “One must always be careful in Underkish.”

“I know,” Indrajit said. “Ghouls, weird Druvash sorcery, and worse. There are thieves down there.”

“This way.” Yammilku turned and climbed down the stairs.

They picked their way carefully down the steps, then crossed a rubble-strewn chamber. Beneath the shattered rock, the floor was slanted. In puddles of light thrown by his raised lamp, Indrajit saw shingles and tar. Halfway across the chamber, he passed the top of a chimney.

Dim light leaked up through the chimney.

Behind the rubble-strewn cavern, they passed through a square doorway, then found themselves at the edge of an abyss. A wooden pole, thick as a solid tree trunk, but shaved down to a smooth cylinder like a ship’s mast, lay on the brickwork at the edge of the chasm and stretched into darkness.

Indrajit leaned over the ravine and tried to look down into it, holding his lamp high. “I think I can see the bottom.”

“No,” Yammilku said. “That’s a ledge.”

“How do you know?”

“I’ve stood on it. But from there, the abyss drops further, and you can’t see the floor.”

“We’re not climbing down, are we?” Indrajit asked.

“We’re crossing.” Yammilku pointed at the beam.

“There’s not another road?” Indrajit wasn’t especially nervous for his own balance, but he worried about the Gund. Not to mention the possibility that Yammilku would attack him as he crossed.

“There is,” Yammilku said. “But the guard I left behind isn’t there anymore, and that makes me nervous. So I’d rather go this way. Or we can get the map out and try to find another road. I don’t know how long that will take.”

Indrajit nodded. “After you.”

Yammilku started across the beam. The pole didn’t budge at all as the Heru stood on it, so Indrajit let him get a few paces ahead and then followed. He breathed deeply, maintained his calm, and didn’t look down. Ten paces along the bridge, he was able to make out the other side, a ragged hole that looked like a natural cave. Twenty paces along, he heard squeaking sounds and something furry and flying swarmed past him in the air, buffeting his head and arms. He windmilled a little, but didn’t lose his balance.

Thirty paces along, the Gund joined him on the pole, and he felt the wood sag beneath his feet.

Indrajit picked up his pace, dancing lightly forward and catching up to the Heru just as they both reached the other side. Manko dragged itself forward across the bridge. Despite its size, the Gund was flexible enough that it leaned forward and gripped the pole with two hands. Its feet, Indrajit saw as it drew closer, had long and prehensile toes, so the Gund clung to the log with all four limbs. At its point of maximum bowing, Indrajit feared the log would snap under the Gund’s weight, dropping it into the chasm to its death, but the beam held, and Manko arrived at the far side with chortling and gurgling sounds.

Philastes crossed easily.

Twenty paces farther, the natural cavern gave way to glass. Yammilku walked onto a translucent greenish floor. When Indrajit followed, he looked down and saw multiple slabs of glass below, each reflecting the yellow lamp light in a series that seemed to curve slightly away in the distance.

Then Yammilku led them up stairs. The stairs climbed through a broad shaft of empty space, between waist-high metal walls with rubbery black bannisters. The steps were metal also, each step ribbed into dozens of tiny spines and interlocking with the steps above and below it via steel teeth. On his first step, the entire staircase seemed to slide, slightly, but then it held and Indrajit ascended.

He was beginning to calm down. Yammilku hadn’t attacked him or led him into an ambush. The Gund seemed to be cheerfully chattering away with Philastes, every time Indrajit paid any attention to them. The absence of Yammilku’s expected sentinel could only be a good thing, surely.

At the top of the stairs, they descended a ramp that was covered with tattered scraps of rug glued to cement beneath. Ahead, the ramp ended in a balcony overlooking a larger room.

“Shield the light,” Yammilku murmured.

Indrajit cupped the flame with his free hand. Yammilku slowly drew his sword, and Indrajit stepped away from the Heru. “What do you fear?”

“The unknown,” Yammilku said.

Indrajit kept a few steps from the Heru. They both hunkered into a crouching posture as they walked. Coming behind them, the Gund stooped forward and walked on all fours again. Its neck was flexible enough that its head pivoted forward when it moved in this fashion. The thicket of insectoid limbs on its shoulders hung over it like a skeletal parasol, rustling slightly.

Philastes walked beside Manko, sling out, its pocket filled with a stone.

Yammilku and Indrajit crept to the balustrade of the balcony at the same time. Indrajit raised his eyes over the polished metal rail and saw a room whose walls were covered in narrow metal doors. They looked like the drawers of a cabinet or dresser, but vertical rather than horizontal. They were painted a dull green. Some were smashed. One lay open.

Narrow wooden benches ran around the room, standing on metal rods bolted to the floor.

Bodies lay on the floor. They were fresh, and Indrajit wondered for a moment whether they were even dead. But they didn’t move, and he heard no sound of breathing, and then he saw that they had wounds.

Puncture wounds, smallish, with little blood.

He stood cautiously, holding the lamp out, and saw that the skin around each wound he could see was purple and bloated.

“The Girdle of Life,” he said. “It was here?”

Yammilku pointed at the open metal door. “It was hung there. These men were guarding it.”

A metal ladder descended into the room. Yammilku went first and stood in the center of the room with his sword gripped in both hands, slowly pivoting and looking in all directions while Indrajit and the others joined him. Several passages exited from this chamber. Nothing stirred.

Manko lowered itself directly from the balcony. Philastes came last, and his legs were shaking.

“The dead men,” Indrajit said. “I think I saw them on the boat with you.”

“Yes,” Yammilku said.

“Fellow Sootfaces?”

“They’re Sookwalkers, mostly.”

Indrajit poked at one of the dead men with a foot. He felt relief again, this time that Fix and Munahim were not among the dead. “The way their flesh is swollen and discolored . . . what does that suggest to you?”

“Venom,” Yammilku said. “They were stabbed. You can see the puncture wounds.”

“Were they betrayed?” Indrajit asked. “Are any of them missing? Maybe one of the men you left behind had a dagger with venom on the blade, and he surprised the others.”

Yammilku counted. “They would have to be idiots for him to surprise them all, eight men, one at a time. In any case, no, this is all of them. Someone attacked them. Your friends, perhaps? The harness is missing.”

“We don’t use venom,” Indrajit said. “And this delicate stab wound . . . that’s not really our style. If Fix and Munahim had killed these men, we’d see wounds from a hatchet and a two-handed sword. Maybe arrows, but not whatever did . . . this.” He pointed at one of the fatal injuries, a circular hole in the throat of a dead man, big enough to shove his thumb into.

“The Kattak,” Philastes said.

Indrajit felt ill.

“What do you mean, the Kattak?” Yammilku asked.

“The giant wasps,” Indrajit said. “The secret rulers of the Paper Sultanate. You’re saying they can inflict lethal wounds like this.”

“Yes,” Philastes said.

“But then . . . are these men impregnated?” Indrajit asked. “Do we need to burn them now?”

“Impregnated?” Yammilku sounded shocked.

Manko groaned.

“They lay their eggs in living men,” Philastes said. “These men are dead, but they’re only dead.”

Yammilku cursed and spat.

Indrajit’s growing sense of peace had evaporated. “Which direction did you come from?” he asked. “After you left the flatboat you attacked us in, and came here, how did you enter the room?”

By way of answer, Yammilku turned and strode to one of the exits. Beneath a square metal lintel opening onto a wide corridor, he stopped.

A sword lay at his feet. It was a long sword, long enough that it could be wielded with two hands. It was of good but simple workmanship, with a plain cross-guard, leather braided around the handle, and a simple iron ball for the pommel.

“Frozen hells,” Indrajit said.

“This is your friend’s?” Yammilku asked.

“The Kyone’s,” Indrajit confirmed. He now saw, scattered around the floor within a couple of paces of the sword, severed insectoid limbs. He saw spatters of black ichor, too, and blood.

“Your Kyone fought something here,” Yammilku said.

“The Kattak,” Indrajit confirmed. “But I see no bodies. Philastes, can you think of any reason why the Kattak would take away a living man, other than to impregnate him?”

“Yes,” Philastes said. “They may also have taken them to eat later.”

“This city reveals a new secret every day,” Yammilku said. “Each more foul than the one before it.”

“Where would they have gone, though?” Indrajit asked. “The Kattak won’t be lurking in the burned ruins of the embassy.”

“The cave beneath is where they eat,” Philastes said. “We passed the edge of it when we fled. The pit full of bodies.”

“Might they lurk there for a while?” Indrajit asked. “While they arrange other housing, say?”

“Potentially for a long while.” Philastes nodded. “They have other servants—the archegoi only do the diplomacy and negotiation. There are clerks and scribes who can help them find a new building and get new archegoi. And yes, in the meantime, they might very well wait in the pit.”

“We need to go to the pit,” Indrajit said.

You need to go to the pit,” Yammilku told him. “I need to go back and tell Betel that we tried, but sadly, the mission failed. Looks like some monster from the deep—maybe it was something called a Kattak but who knows, really—got the jobbers. So sad.”

Indrajit wanted to threaten the Heru. He wanted to say he’d reveal Yammilku’s leadership in the attempt to overthrow Betel, but Yammilku had already claimed that he had tricked Indrajit by pretending to lead a coup. He’d gotten one step ahead of Indrajit. Either Betel already knew that Yammilku was a snake in the grass, or he didn’t, and Indrajit had nothing more to say, either way.

He wanted to draw his sword, but Yammilku was already armed, and if Indrajit took Vacho in hand, Yammilku might take that as an invitation to attack.

“Please,” he said. “We need help.”

“Goodbye.” Yammilku turned back, walking toward an exit opposite the one where they’d found Munahim’s sword.

Manko seized him. With one hand, the Gund grabbed the front of the Heru’s tunic. At the same time, the insectlike limbs sprouting from its shoulders fell on Yammilku and gripped him about the shoulders, pinning his sword arm in place and holding him. Manko lifted its prisoner off the ground.

Philastes groaned, and Manko groaned back.

“Do you speak Gund?” Philastes’s voice was polite, almost cheerful.

“Put me down!” Yammilku snapped.

“That must be a no. Manko says you are to obey the fish-head.”

“Hey,” Indrajit objected.

“I’m just repeating what Manko says.” Philastes shrugged.

“You could . . . smooth it out a little bit. You are supposed to be a diplomat.”

“I’m a junior diplomat. Not very experienced.”

Manko groaned again.

“He says, ‘Take the fish-head to the pit,’” Philastes said.

“Blaatshi,” Indrajit said.

“There is no word for Blaatshi in Gund,” Philastes said. “He’s saying ‘fish-head.’”

“I understand that,” Indrajit said. “When he says ‘fish-head,’ you can translate it as ‘Blaatshi.’”

“That would be twisting his words, we’d risk misunderstanding.”

“Oh, I think we’d understand him just fine.”

Yammilku reached with his left hand to grab his sword, and Manko took the sword away. He roared, scarred face a handspan from Yammilku’s beak.

“He won’t tell you again,” Philastes said. “Help the . . . Blaatshi.”

“That’s better.”

“It’s foolish,” Yammilku said. “Your friends are dead, or will be soon.”

“Tunk believed that the Girdle of Life could help him, didn’t he?” Indrajit asked Philastes.

“It didn’t, though,” Philastes pointed out.

“Because it wasn’t attached to the device,” Indrajit said.

“What device?” Yammilku asked.

“The Druvash sorcery device the Vin Dalu have. Never mind.” Indrajit shook his head. “Look, maybe we can rescue my friends before they’re injected with eggs or eaten. And if they are impregnated, maybe the Vin Dalu can help them, assuming we can get them the harness.”

“Maybe, maybe, assuming,” Yammilku said, mocking.

“You planned to throw away my life in your coup attempt,” Indrajit said. “I owe you nothing but revenge. You help me get to the pit, and I will forgive you.”

Yammilku sneered. “I don’t work for forgiveness.”

Indrajit shrugged. “If you refuse to help, I’ll throw you down the next pit.”

Manko growled and belched.

“I have no choice.” Yammilku shook his head. “I’ll do it.”

“No sword for you, until you’ve earned it,” Indrajit said.

Manko set Yammilku on his feet, but held on to the Heru’s weapon.

“You take us back to the spot where you attacked us,” Indrajit said. “I’ll get us to the pit from there.”

“You don’t want to just use the map?” Yammilku suggested.

“Actually,” Indrajit said, “I do not. Get going.”

Indrajit resumed following Yammilku through the underworld of Kish. The trail from here was not nearly as strange, and there were no abysses to cross. They padded through galleries and caverns and chambers by the light of Indrajit’s lamp. When they heard rustling sounds in the darkness, Manko bellowed, and the rustling became the slapping of fleeing feet. They climbed up stairs and down, and finally came to the river of sewage, and a flatboat floating in it.

“The water is an ell higher than when I passed this way,” Yammilku said. “Look how close the boat is to the ceiling.”

“Is the water still rising?” Philastes asked.

“We’ll find out,” Indrajit said. “Get in the boat.”


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