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Chapter Fourteen

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“Just hold on a minute,” Indrajit said.

He emerged into the hall, hearing Larch’s feet as the archegos minor leaped from the bed and came padding after him. Fix stood guard at the mouth of the hallway, lamp raised high. Munahim waited at the end of the hall, an arrow to the string.

Indrajit threw open the door to the next room. This was larger than Larch’s, with a bigger bed, a dressing screen, and a divan. A completely bald man sat up in bed, sheet clutched around his chest. He wore a heavy dressing gown, and the lamplight over Indrajit’s shoulder revealed chalky skin, pouting eyes, tiny ears, and delicate fingers.

“I have very little money,” the bald man said.

“I’m not a robber,” Indrajit said. “Thomedes Tunk?”

The bald man hesitated. “Yes. Are you here on an embassy matter?”

“Your underling Larch bought a Druvash artifact from one of the Gray Lords,” Indrajit said. “I presume you know about that.”

“What if I do? Who are you, and what business is it of yours?”

Indrajit shook his head. “I’m not introducing myself. Here’s the deal. I need that harness. I can probably give it back, and if I can, I will. And I will pay for the rental.”

“Are you . . . ?” Tunk’s eyes narrowed. “Have you met the hyperarchegoi?”

“You mean the giant bugs? Yes. Despite not being invited to any of the good parties, apparently. Now where is the harness?” Indrajit rifled through the objects resting on the table: a book, candles, an unlit lamp, several pots containing various sorts of makeup.

“Are you . . . bound for the birthing?” Tunk asked.

Indrajit growled. “Larch asked the same thing. Frozen hells, why would you think that?”

Larch padded to the doorway. “It’s just . . .”

“What do you want with the harness?” Tunk asked. “Do you know how to make it work?”

“Do you know how to make it work?” Indrajit asked. “How did you hear about it, anyway? You weren’t walking along the Crooked Mile one day, and someone casually mentioned that a Druvash Girdle of Life had been found.”

“I was at a party,” Tunk said. “Eating cheese and drinking wine. And it was a Bonean prince, actually, who mentioned that a Druvash Girdle of Life had been found.”

“This still doesn’t sound right,” Indrajit said. He poked around behind the dressing screen, finding a bar from which hung several tunics and robes.

“He was a minor scholar as well as a prince,” Tunk said. “The Druvash were lords of Boné as well, you know.”

“I did know,” Indrajit said. “They were lords of the whole Serpent Sea and all its lands.”

“But he had no money to buy the Girdle for his collection,” Tunk said, “so he was complaining to me.”

“Complaining to you?” Indrajit asked. “Or trying to borrow money?” He knocked cushions from the divan and then looked under it, but found nothing.

“Does it matter?” Tunk pouted.

“Not really,” Indrajit admitted. “Are you trying to raise a dead person?”

“Dead person?” Tunk’s jaw fell open.

“Okay, never mind. What are you planning to do with the Girdle?”

“Dead person?” Tunk asked again.

Suddenly, Indrajit understood. “You’ve been . . . impregnated.”

“I’m a man!” Tunk snapped.

“You’re bound for the birthing,” Indrajit said. “Is this what happens at the parties? The embassy has elegant events. Come for dinner, dancing, and a little giant-wasp impregnation?”

Tunk shuddered, trembling in all his limbs. “I didn’t ask for it.”

“Of course you didn’t ask for it,” Indrajit snapped. He grunted, gnawed his lip, tried to think what to do. “You were promoted or punished, it looks the same to me. So the wasp-monsters came to the parties?”

“Behind the scenes,” Tunk said. “They were the hosts. Something terrible is going to happen to the city.”

“This is Kish,” Indrajit said. “Many terrible things are going to happen to it. Which one did you have in mind?” He grew weary of holding the Kattak nymph, so he tossed it on the floor and ground it under his heel.

Tunk shuddered, staring at the pulped nymph. “I don’t know. I just know . . . something terrible.”

Indrajit nodded. “Look, I need the harness. I don’t think you can make it work, anyway. It attaches to a larger device that makes it function. You have to have both. And I’m not sure that the harness will stop the birthing, in any case. Maybe it will, but, as far as I know, its purpose is to raise the dead. Or the nearly dead.”

“Do you know Druvash craft?” Tunk asked. “I’ll pay you!”

Indrajit snorted. “What good would that do, even if I did? If I . . . healed you, but left you here, they’d just do it to you again.”

“I’ll come with you!” Tunk gushed.

“So will I!” Larch said.

“I don’t like it,” Indrajit grumbled.

“I don’t care, one way or the other,” Fix called. “But we need to get out of here now.”

“Give me the Girdle,” Indrajit said. “I’ll give you twenty crowns. And if I can’t bring it back to you in a week, I’ll give you another twenty crowns.”

“You aren’t listening to me,” Tunk said. “I need to be treated. Do you know a Druvash sorcerer?”

The archegos major was lucid, but Indrajit now saw that his arms were gaunt, as Frick’s had been.

“Yes,” Indrajit said. “We know three of them. Twenty crowns, and I’ll introduce you to them, too.”

Tunk rose from his bed, sheet still wrapped around him. “I’m coming with you.”

“I’m coming, too!” Larch said.

“No,” Indrajit said.

“Hurry up,” Fix urged.

“Yes,” Tunk insisted.

He dropped the sheet. The robe he wore was of thick, layered silk, richly embroidered. It was also lumpy, as if he were wearing it over something else.

“Wait a minute,” Indrajit said.

Tunk opened his robe, and beneath it, Indrajit saw black straps crossing the man’s chest. Straps like those depicted in the picture of the Girdle of Life.

“Frozen hells,” he muttered.

“Indrajit, now!” Fix snapped.

“We’re coming,” Indrajit said. He exited into the hall. Tunk and Larch followed him.

“We?” Fix shook his head, then saw Tunk’s harness, then sighed. “Fine. You’ll explain later. What’s the fastest way out of here?”

Fix had also disposed of his nymph, which was now a smear on the floor.

Tunk shrugged. “However you came in. There are armed men surrounding the building.”

“Secret exits?” Munahim asked. “Ways out, just in case?”

Indrajit moved from the hall into the square room. “There’s the front door!” he cried. “Out the front door and we sprint for the fence!”

“Even if you make it to the fence,” Tunk said, “there’s the Fallen Stars Watch.”

“What’s that?” Fix raised the lamp, looking with suspicion at the stairs down which they’d come earlier.

Munahim wrinkled his nose.

“The guards of every house on the street are sworn to help each other,” Tunk explained. “If you get past the embassy guards to the street, the guards next door and across the street and every guard all the way to Bank Street will try to stop you. They get paid a bonus if they succeed, out of a pot everyone pays into.”

“I admire the civic self-organization,” Fix muttered, “though I find it personally inconvenient.”

“Besides,” Larch said, “someone’s at the door.”

Indrajit looked, in time to see shadowy outlines of men through the glass of the front doors. Then a stone crashed through the window. One man with shield and spear rushed through, and Munahim loosed an arrow, dropping him to the floor.

The other outlines dropped out of sight as the men took cover.

“The map,” Indrajit said.

“What map?” Tunk asked.

“You think there’s an exit into the underworld here?” Fix asked.

Indrajit sheathed his sword and scrambled to open the map. “Just heat the Crown here and let’s look.”

Fix carefully unfolded the map. He held up the light and the hidden lines of the map of the lower city faded quickly into view. “Now, where are we?”

“Here,” Indrajit said. “This is the Crown. There’s the Spike. This must be the Street of Fallen Stars, more or less.”

“The stairs!” Munahim raised his bow to loose an arrow, and the string snapped. “Ow!” His arrow flew sideways and skittered across the floor.

Indrajit and Fix turned to look at the stairs and saw one of the Kattak descending in a rush. Indrajit had no idea which of the two it was, or whether it might even be a third wasp-man. He drew his sword again, grunting in frustration.

Fix threw the lamp.

The clay lamp shattered against a paper-shrouded wall, scattering flaming oil against the wall, the floor beneath it, and the ceiling above. The Kattak made an angry clattering sound with its mandibles and Indrajit leaped forward to fight it.

He dropped the map. For a moment, he lost his sense of where he was, and where the fire was, and he feared that he or the map would be engulfed. Then Vacho crashed down on top of the Kattak’s head, crunching into chitin. The Kattak shrieked and Indrajit snapped back into his own senses.

Munahim slammed into the wasp-man at his side, striking twice in quick succession with his enormous blade. The wasp-man shrieked and pulled back, plunging into a smooth paper wall and disappearing. In his wake, the wall was left a gaping hole, revealing a doorway Indrajit hadn’t seen was there.

“We could follow the Kattak,” Indrajit said. “He might be fleeing the fire. Or we could go back the way we came.”

“No,” Fix said. “Look, you were right. See this line?” He held up the map. Indrajit did not clearly see the line, because he kept swinging his head about, looking for more attackers. “This has to be very close to here. And this word here, of course, gives it away.” He pointed at a glyph.

“Don’t be smug,” Indrajit said. “Gives what away?”

“It says ‘spider.’ And that one next to it says ‘fire.’”

“First of all, I thought this was Graykin, and you couldn’t read it.”

“I can’t read the other things on the map,” Fix said. “The visible text. But the Graykin, the invisible text, I can puzzle out a bit. I was something of a notorious criminal before I met you.”

“I remember,” Indrajit said. “You were buying and selling risk without being registered. Pretty nefarious stuff.”

“So I had a few dealings with gangsters, and I learned a glyph or two.”

“Great,” Indrajit said. “You have lit a fire, so now all we need to is to find spiders, and that will no doubt show us the way down into a good escape tunnel.”

The fire engulfed the stairs now. Thunder rumbled. Through the broken front door, Indrajit heard rain crashing on the lawn and on the street. From the second story, he heard scratching and clicking sounds. Munahim had nearly finished restringing his bow, pulling the spare from his quiver.

“Men are trying to come in through the front door again,” Munahim warned. He shot another arrow in that direction.

“There’s a side door through the kitchen,” Larch said. “Maybe no one will be watching it. Maybe in the rain, we can sneak out without being seen.”

Indrajit rushed into the kitchen, dragging the others in his wake. The room was dark and cold, a long rectangle dominated by two long, narrow tables. Munahim wrinkled his nose as they entered the dark room, and Indrajit smelled rotting meat.

“Why aren’t you wrapped in paper?” he asked Tunk as he groped for a light source. The fire in the square hall behind him threw erratic, dancing shadow around the kitchen. Meat hooks looked like hangman’s nooses and the wide, tall windows like unfathomable abysses, with lightning flashing somewhere in their depths.

“You mean poor Frick.” Tunk shook as he walked, and gripped the edge of the table to lean on it. “Perhaps the harness is helping me.”

“What have you done to activate it?” Indrajit asked.

“Spells. Prayers. Wearing it, mostly.”

“The Girdle isn’t helping,” Fix said. “It isn’t powered, it might as well just be clothing.”

“You don’t know that,” Tunk said.

“We’re pretty sure,” Indrajit said.

“Then perhaps I’m just not as far along as Frick was.” Tunk’s voice was pained. “Or perhaps they needed me free, to continue to speak for them. I am, after all, archegos major. Or perhaps they would be wrapping me even now in paper, but for your arrival.”

“This door is locked,” Fix called from the corner. “Can we get a light?”

“Still looking for one.” Indrajit found knives, and the partly devoured carcass of a bird. And another Kattak nymph, crawling like a slug across the table. He picked it up and stared at its moving pincers.

“Please help me,” Tunk said.

Indrajit sighed. “We’re trying to help all of us.”

A clash of metal filled the room. Indrajit spun about and saw Munahim in the door by which they’d entered. He was a silhouette, and his long sword was a thrashing arm. Beyond him, yellow and clicking in the flame-scoured room they’d left, was one of the Kattak. Munahim yelled, slashed, and kicked, and Indrajit ran to help.

He pressed himself into one side of the doorway and together they erected a fence of sharpened steel. The Kattak didn’t give up, lunging to bite with its mandibles and scratch with its legs. Indrajit’s thighs grew bloody with small slash marks, and he feared they were being encircled, to be attacked from some other kitchen entrance. The Kattak’s sting, a long, sharp appendage the size of a spear, darted over its head, stabbing again and again and getting closer and closer.

Indrajit threw the nymph.

The Kattak spun about, lunging as if to catch the little sluglike creature. Indrajit dove after it, sinking Vacho into the wasp-man’s abdomen.

The Kattak shrieked wordlessly, and Munahim sliced off its sting in a single blow.

The Kattak scooped up the nymph and raced away toward the front doors. Indrajit heard the twang of bows or crossbows and he and Munahim ran back into the kitchen. Together, they overturned a table and shoved it against the door.

“I found one!” Larch raised a burning lamp, rescuing them from total darkness.

“Bring it over here,” Fix ordered. Larch brought him the light and Fix worked at the lock on the doorway in the kitchen corner.

Tunk lay draped over the corner of the remaining table, breathing hard.

“How can you have been surprised by any of this?” Indrajit asked.

“Surprised by what?” Tunk’s voice was weak, remote.

“You seem astonished and dismayed at Lysander Frick’s death,” Indrajit said. “But how can that be? Are these Kattak not the overlords of your people? Are they not your sultans? How do you not know how they reproduce?”

“They are few,” Tunk grunted. “We are many. They are mostly hidden from view, inside the temples and their mountain chasms. Who can count how many priests go into a temple and how many emerge, especially when so many come from remote villages?”

“One of them said he . . . hatched from a Yuchak,” Indrajit said.

“We always give them prisoners,” Tunk said. “Our people are sailors and pirates, there are always prisoners to give to the sultan and his house. We knew they ate human flesh. We didn’t know they laid eggs inside living human bodies. If anyone knows, perhaps it is a priestly secret. But here . . . prisoners are harder to come by.”

Indrajit snorted. “Are you kidding? It’s the easiest thing in the world to buy a slave.”

“Welcome to Kish,” Munahim said.

“A slave would not do.” Tunk seemed to be pressing his face harder and harder against the wood. “Only a person of quality—a warrior, a scholar, a priest, someone of high value captured in a raid.”

“A diplomat,” Indrajit said. “A lord’s servant.”

“Help me,” Tunk pleaded.

Munahim stood beside the fireplace, sniffing. It was an enormous brick cavern, large enough that an ox might easily be impaled and slung over flames inside it. Indrajit checked an open doorway in another corner, found only darkness and flapping paper, and then joined Munahim.

“What are you smelling? That moisture is rain, coming down the chimney, isn’t it?”

“They don’t use this fireplace,” Munahim said. “Haven’t used it for months.”

Indrajit thought he heard a coughing sound. He kicked a chair against the wall beneath the high windows and then stepped onto it. He pressed his face against the glass. He could see bulky shadows.

Lightning flashed.

There was too much to absorb in one glance, but he saw the scarred face of Tully Roberts and his bright blue scarf. He saw more scarves, men in cloaks, and more.

He dropped down from the chair.

“Stop,” he said.

Fix looked up from fiddling with the lock, a heavy iron rectangle adjoining the door’s handle.

“There are men outside,” Indrajit said, lowering his voice. “Shambs, men in scarves and cloaks, and something big. A Grokonk, a Luzzazza, a Gund, I’m not sure.”

“The embassy guards?” Fix whispered.

Tunk groaned. “We do not employ Shambs or a Gund.”

“I saw cloaks,” Indrajit said. “But I also saw bright scarves.”

Indrajit heard shouting elsewhere in the embassy. Fix pointed at the open doorway into darkness.

“Wait,” Indrajit said. “What did you tell me you read on the map?”

“‘Spider’ and ‘fire,’” Fix said.

Indrajit pointed at the fireplace. “There’s a descending shaft here. Is it possible the words on the map say ‘fireplace’ and ‘wasp’?”

Tunk burst into tears.

“Please, help me,” he said.

“Do we risk it?” Fix asked.

Indrajit took the lamp from Larch’s hand. He stepped into the dark open doorway and touched the lamp to the paper adhering to the walls. Flame exploded upward immediately, showing a nightmare landscape of paper-wrapped furniture and warped, irregular tunnels beyond.

The shadowy form of a Kattak scurried away into darkness beyond the reach of the flames.

“Munahim first,” Indrajit said. “You may be able to smell things coming. Fix next. I’ll bring up the rear with these two. Time to see if this map is worth all the fuss.”


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