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Chapter Twenty-Seven

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“You’ll know when to kill me,” Fix said through gritted teeth.

“It won’t come to that,” Indrajit said. “We’re going to burn out the Kattak, then get you to the Vin Dalu for treatment, end of story. You’re the hero. We’ll tell Alea, she’ll leave her husband for you, you retire to wealth and fame.”

The four Protagonists traveled with a gang of Sootfaces, Silksteppers, and Sailmenders. They moved in a wide line as if they were hunting ground birds, trying to flush the creatures out of the bushes to catch them for a festal meal.

Which maybe, in a way, they were.

They were all armed, and they held torches. Some had nets and ropes and poles, and the thieves had all armored up. Elsewhere, other thieves lay in wait to effect the assault plan. They passed through a massive chamber dotted with pillars. Up ahead, and close, there should be a chamber with a stream and a nest of Ghouls.

Avchat followed behind the line of thieves.

“I was believing you until that last bit,” Fix said.

“Okay,” Indrajit conceded. “No fame for you. Should I . . .” He hesitated. “Listen, if anything happens to you, do you want me to communicate something to Alea?”

“No,” Fix said firmly. “Or rather, no little love poems or anything. Tell her I wished her happiness to the last breath.”

“If I die,” Indrajit said, “please tell her the same from me.”

Fix laughed, gagged, and then spit up bile. “If this works, and we destroy the Kattak, you should take Munahim to meet the Lord Chamberlain.”

“While you’re being treated by the Vin Dalu.”

“Yes. Yes, exactly.”

The map was marked with glyphs that seemed to indicate the presence of Ghouls. Graykin apparently didn’t have a name or an icon for Ghoul, but corpse eaters was plain enough. When Fix and Betel had puzzled this out together, Indrajit had managed to refrain from any cutting remark about literacy.

Fix had shot him a quizzical glance, and he had ignored it.

“Ghoul!” a thief on the far right yelled.

Indrajit saw the creature, pale, long-tailed, and hairless. It sprang from the shadow of a brick column and raced away to the right.

“Don’t follow it!” Fix shouted. “It’s trying to lead you away!”

Munahim and a thief with a crossbow both turned to follow the Ghoul, launching their missiles at him simultaneously. The Ghoul took a bolt in the neck and an arrow through the lungs and dropped dead instantly.

“Here we go!” Uthnar Roberts bellowed. “Steady, and don’t let them touch you!”

The brick field ended in a shattered chaos of brick and stone mingled, and then the posse of thieves and Protagonists entered the nest.

Ghouls hurled themselves forward. Thieves held them back with poles or threw nets over them. They slashed at the Ghouls to push them back, wounding them freely but killing them only if necessary. The plan was not to kill the Ghouls.

The plan was to drive them.

Beyond the fighting Ghouls lay their nest, which looked like a village of wattle and daub huts built of driftwood and bones. The village lay along a trickle of black water. Indrajit wrinkled his nose at the smell.

More Ghouls slipped out a passage at the back of the cavern, visible in the flickering torchlight. The line of Ghouls fighting formed into a snarling, ragged wedge and charged, but thieves placed in the middle of the line blew trumpets.

The Ghouls howled and fell back.

“On their heels!” Betel roared.

Zaal Pisko, Fanchee Gray Lord of the Sailmenders, blew a horn and fought with a spear in his other hand. He ran after the Ghouls, pricking at their heels with his weapon.

As they passed, the thieves gave the torch to the huts, setting them ablaze. They didn’t want the Ghouls to circle back and reoccupy their nest.

“I feel slightly ill at ease, burning these creatures out of their homes,” Indrajit murmured to Fix as they jogged. “I’d have felt better if they slept in a heap in the mud, rather than building buildings.”

Philastes Larch overheard the conversation and interjected himself. “The Ghouls are men, and they are also monsters. If they learned not to be monsters, then we could treat them like men.”

Was he talking about Ghouls, or about the Kattak?

Was he, in some way, talking about himself?

“Well said,” Munahim told him.

They chased the Ghouls along two avenues. The first was lined with mausolea and tombs, and reminded Indrajit of his own foray to the necropolis south of the city—he had been there only briefly, and had been fortunate enough to avoid Ghouls, but they must haunt the place. As Ghouls tried to veer off left and right, thieves touched flame to lines of oil poured out in advance, sending up walls of fire.

The avenue of bones ended at a crude junction of natural caverns and a stone bridge over a chasm. Here, thieves with poles and nets sprang up from the natural caverns to present a bristling, impassable wall. Ghouls that got past the poles were dragged to the ground under nets, and then released to follow their fellows across the stone arch.

The Protagonists and the thieves plodded determinedly in the Ghouls’ wake. They crossed the bridge, and on the other side one last group of thieves, Southlookers and Stilejumpers, battered the wave of Ghouls aside.

The Ghouls ran shrieking and gibbering to the only exit left to them: a wall of paper, rent by several large holes. It was the pit beneath the Paper Sultanates’ Embassy, and the Ghouls poured in.

The great deficit in his plan, Indrajit thought, was that he would like to have lit the Ghouls on fire before launching them into the pit.

“Is it dawn yet?” he asked.

Fix shook his head. “If it is, we’re late.”

Thieves and Protagonists hurled bottles of oil into the Kattak nest.

“Keep your distance!” Pisko bellowed. “This will be a furnace!”

They threw torches and fell back.

Fire raced into the depths of the pit like an explosion. It leaped upward, too, springing up the great sheets and twists and cones of Kattak-made paper toward the ceiling. Above them somewhere was the hole into which Philastes and his colleagues had thrown slaves and prisoners.

Some in whom the Kattak had laid their eggs.

Others whom they had eaten.

As the paper burned, it threw images in all direction like a demented, spinning shadow show. Indrajit saw the chaotic, multiform Ghouls hurl themselves in panic and fury on large wasps, and the wasps respond with fatal stinger attacks, all as shadow play on enormous paper screens. He tried counting the Kattak.

“There are way more than we thought,” he murmured. “Dozens.”

“A hundred,” Fix answered. “More.”

“Frozen hells,” Indrajit continued. “Think of all the memories in that. The minds, or souls, or whatever, of all the men in whose bodies the Kattak incubated.”

Fix vomited.

The Gray Lord of the Stilejumpers was named Bocho Bin Bagu. He was long legged and long armed and had a tiny body and head, and his skin was blue; Indrajit thought his race might be called the Iyatu. They came from Easha and lived under trees, or up in treetops, or something similar.

“Hold the line!” Bin Bagu shouted.

A half dozen Kattak flew directly toward the thieves. They cast no shadow as they came, but were easy to see, because they were on fire.

Munahim began launching arrows. Philastes planted the butt of the pole he held against a chunk of masonry bigger than himself, projecting the tip forward. Fix gasped for breath and leaned forward, and Indrajit moved to put himself between his friend and the oncoming wasp-men.

“Stay down,” he muttered.

Two Kattak crashed through the paper, heading right for the Protagonists. The paper ripped from the ceiling and came with them like a veil, so they looked like two burning eyes in the face of a ghost. Philastes struck one right in the center of its face with his pole and held it at bay as it hummed angrily.

Munahim shot several arrows into the other and then Indrajit slashed it through its spherical head with Vacho. The Kattak veered right, twisting and crashing and carrying the paper with it. It struck the stone floor in a burst of flame and ichor just cubits from the forger Avchat, insectoid body spasming violently. Avchat shrieked and jumped back. Indrajit lashed the Kattak’s head again with his sword.

As the paper jerked sideways, Philastes lost his grip on his pole. He yelled and jumped, falling into the pit in his effort to get out of the way. The Kattak, freed of impediment, dove on Fix with its stinger raised high. Fix struggled to raise his weapons in defense, but could barely move. Indrajit smelled a dry and dusty reek of roasting insect and saw the gleam of venom on the Kattak’s sting. He turned and tried to get back in time to defend Fix, but he was in motion the other way and his balance was off; he wasn’t going to make it. Munahim yelled and slapped his quiver, but found that he was out of arrows.

Zac Betel himself came to the rescue. A barrage of four hammers crashed into the side of the Kattak, and Indrajit heard a loud cracking sound as the Kattak’s carapace gave way. The Kattak spun sideways abruptly, bumping into its flaming companion and then slipping to the edge of the pit. It pawed at the stone underfoot weakly, but its limbs seemed to have lost strength, and the weight of its thorax dragged it down.

Fix lurched to its side and dispatched it with an ax-blow to the head.

Fire hung in columns and curtains from the ceiling. The manlike shadows of Ghouls and the horse-sized wasp shadows of the Kattak still struggled down among the ashes, but slowly, as if they were all wounded or dying.

Philastes dragged himself from the pit.

The shadows of further Kattak slipped up and away through the ceiling.

“With me, Sailmenders!” Zaal Pisko marched into the pit to dispatch the Kattak there.

“The entrance to the embassy!” Betel barked. “The wasps are on the surface!”

“Take Fix and the scribe and go,” Indrajit told Philastes.

Philastes nodded. He gathered up Avchat, who was gibbering and shaking; two Kishi Sootfaces accompanied them, and they set out on the path to the home of the Vin Dalu.

“Gods go with you!” Indrajit called to his partner’s receding, limping form.

“The entrance,” Betel growled. “We lose time.”

Indrajit led the Sootfaces and Silksteppers up the shaft and through the chimney into the embassy of the Paper Sultanates. Munahim came just behind him, and Indrajit was prepared at any moment to die by wasp sting, or at least to leap into combat with one of the massive insect-men, but he got all the way up and into the kitchen without encountering them at all.

The room and the building were scorched, much of the paint peeled away and the wood reduced to ash or to charred, whittled timbers.

“Dawn is here,” he murmured, seeing the gray light through the shattered kitchen windows.

“Not yet.” Munahim clambered out of the hearth behind him. “Soon, but not yet.”

They rushed out into the yard, not waiting for the thieves to catch up.

Kattak dead and dying littered the embassy compound. They were scorched, stabbed, slashed, and chopped, and they lay grappled in death with men in studded leather armor and gray cloaks and men fighting with short clubs.

Several knots of men in gray still fought Kattak, and Indrajit and Munahim charged to the aid of the nearest. A Kattak missing two legs hovered above the marshy ground, trying to land a stinger blow on a fighter with a shield and an ax. When the Kattak lunged to stab again, Munahim swung his long sword and severed the stinger.

Indrajit sank Vacho’s blade into the Kattak’s thorax, and then the man in the cloak jumped forward with his ax in motion. He chopped off another pair of arms and a wing, and finally sank his ax’s blade into the wasp-man’s head.

The Kattak fell still.

“Thank you,” the cloaked man said. It was Yuto Harlee.

Indrajit felt uncomfortable. “You might be in trouble,” he warned the tavernkeeper and usurper Gray Lord. “Betel and Roberts will be out any minute.”

He saw, now that he could catch his breath, that the buildings of the embassy were all on fire. How far had Fix gotten?

“I might be in trouble,” Harlee admitted, “but I’ve done my part to save Kish.”

“Are the Kattak all dead?” Indrajit asked.

“I don’t know how many died below,” Harlee said, “but many emerged.”

“And you killed them,” Munahim said.

“Of the many, we killed a few.” Harlee pointed at the nearest Kattak corpse. “Many still escaped us and are on the loose.”

“Frozen hells.”

“Where did they go?” Munahim asked.

Harlee made a wide gesture with his ax that might have encompassed half the city. “Some flew. Some crawled. Some climbed. One leaped onto the back of a two-humped drogger and stung the beast until it burst into a gallop. We tried.”

“How did you know to come here?” Indrajit asked.

“I’m a Gray Lord, and full of guile.” Harlee grinned. “We pretended to leave the False Palace and then spied on you.”

“In order to help?”

“I don’t wish war against the other Gray Lords,” Harlee said. “I just want them to acknowledge me in my place.”

“Good luck with that,” Indrajit said. “My much simpler hope is to survive the day.”

He and Munahim threw off the cloaks that would only slow them down now, turned toward the east, and ran.

“The Lord Chamberlain is acting the role of one of the Dawn Priests this year,” Indrajit said, reminding himself of what Grit Wopal had told them earlier. “The Dawn Priests meet in the East Flats and proceed in solemn march until they reach the Dregs Gate, which for today only is called by its formal name, the Dawn Gate. At noon, the Dawn Priests break through that gate and the battle proper commences.”

“We go to meet the Lord Chamberlain in the East Flats,” Munahim said.

“At the Stink Sook, at dawn.”

“I’m afraid to ask why it’s called that,” the Kyone said.

Indrajit chuckled. “Guess.”

Without Philastes and Fix, the two long-legged Protagonists fairly raced across the Crown. Around them, Indrajit saw signs of the Battle of Last Light in its preliminaries. Men dressed in black from head to toe, who must be Dusk Priests, assembled at corners and in small plazas, beneath banners. He couldn’t read any of the writing on the banners—neither could Munahim—but seals and images told him that these were battalions sponsored and mustered by various guilds and families.

Would Orem Thrush be marching under his own banner? Or under some other flag?

“Fertilizer,” Munahim guessed.

“Ah, no, there is indeed such a market,” Indrajit said. “But it’s located in the Caravanserai, and it’s called the Emperor’s Paddock. For whatever reason. Maybe the Emperor once kept cattle there, in the days when Kish had an emperor.”

“Sewage?” Munahim asked.

“Fish,” Indrajit told him.

“That would have been my third guess.”

They rounded a corner and found a dead drogger blocking the street. Constables with shields and spears formed a loose wedge at the base of a palace; looking up, Indrajit saw a Kattak perched on the edge of the building’s roof.

“Fire,” he advised the constables’ captain as they passed. “And show no mercy.”

“But there should be more of them, shouldn’t there?” Munahim asked.

“Maybe they fled,” Indrajit said. “Maybe they realized that their plan was defeated and they ran away.”

“Is that how the Kattak strike you? Prone to fleeing?”

“No.” Indrajit increased his pace.

The Dawn Gate was manned by Handlers. Indrajit found himself struck by a sudden inspiration, and searched the faces for Mote Gannon himself, head of the Handlers. He was disappointed—the Dawn Gate garrison consisted of a Luzzazza, a scab-eyed Gund, and six Zalaptings. Wearing ceremonial black, four Dusk Priests also stood in the gate and pantomimed defending it.

Indrajit stopped in the gate to address the Handlers. “Ah . . . I know we have some history.”

The Luzzazza bellowed. Was this the very one who had lost an arm to Indrajit? Indrajit tried to look regretful.

“Listen, there are Kattak all over the city,” Indrajit said. “Wasp-men, the size of horses.”

The Zalaptings looked at each other. “We’ve seen one,” one of them said.

“They came to destroy Kish,” Indrajit said. “It may be that their plan has basically failed.”

“If you see any men bursting open and spilling larval insects on the ground,” Munahim said, “kill all the larvae. And the man.”

“Yes,” Indrajit said. “Also . . . look, if you can spare any men from your various gate contracts, you might think seriously about seeing to the defense of your patrons. Maybe the crisis is past, but . . . maybe it’s about to get crazy.”

“We don’t take orders from you,” the Luzzazza grumped.

“Just think about it.” Indrajit and Munahim passed through the gate, Indrajit speaking over his shoulder. “And tell the guys on the walls. They’re not Handlers, I know, but maybe they can be useful.”

The Handlers stared as Indrajit and Munahim descended into the Dregs. There were neither Dawn Priests nor Dusk Priests mustering here, just the usual strung-out addicts who happened to be awake at the end of the night, staring at nothing or asking for alms.

Indrajit wanted to turn aside and run to the Vin Dalu, to ask if Fix had made it in time, if he was healed, and what price he had had to pay. But he had no time.

The Handlers at the easternmost gate jeered Indrajit and Munahim as they passed through. The sun cracked over the plains to the east just as the two Protagonists reached the Stink Sook.


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