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Chapter Nine

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The Protagonists reseated the latrine board as best they could and emerged from an alley into the Paper Sook itself. At Indrajit’s suggestion, they went to Frodilo Choot’s office. Choot stood at her counter, copying one ledger into another; Yozak sat on a wooden block in the corner, scratching himself and making whistling noises, though Indrajit wasn’t sure through which aperture he was forcing air.

Fix paced, rubbing his knuckles.

“You guys really drew some attention this morning,” Choot said.

“I hope it wasn’t too embarrassing.” Indrajit smiled. “We didn’t shout your name or anything.”

“It was a little embarrassing. I did write your bond.”

“You could have spared us that,” Indrajit said. “Just as you can spare us from attracting attention now, by directing us to a forger.”

“What attention?” Choot asked.

“You don’t want to know,” Indrajit said.

I don’t want to know,” Munahim murmured.

“Danel Avchat,” she suggested.

“The Bonean scribe?” Fix asked.

“I thought he was Pelthite.” Choot shrugged. “He’s been known to provide falsified documents, on occasion. Fake stockholder certificates, fake identities.”

“Not to you, of course,” Indrajit said.

Choot went back to her ledger.

Fix charged out the door and took a decisive turn.

“Why a forger?” Munahim asked. “Fix can read and write, can’t he? Why don’t we just make a copy? Or hire an ordinary scribe?”

“An ordinary scribe writes things down and reads things,” Fix said.

“Which, as we all know,” Indrajit added, “is a blot upon the races of man, and the reason why we were sundered into the thousand races.”

“Reading and writing?” Fix asked. “Really, the Epic says that’s why there are a thousand races of man?”

“No,” Indrajit said, “but I kind of like the idea. I’m thinking maybe I’ll compose a few lines to that effect and pass them on to my apprentice.”

“But isn’t that what we need?” Munahim pressed.

“A forger looks at an existing document,” Fix continued, “or an existing type of document, and makes an exact copy. The stakes are high, because success means money, and failure means prison or mutilation. His copy has to pass scrutiny, sometimes the scrutiny of experts or of people familiar with the real document, who have to believe they’re looking at the original.”

“That’s what we want,” Indrajit said. “We want Betel thoroughly convinced we’ve given him the real thing. Or if we give him the real one and we give the forgery back, we want Sehama satisfied that he has his map back.”

“But it has to be fast,” Fix growled.

The sun was sinking in the west. The first of the three days was nearly past, and they still didn’t even know where the Girdle of Life was.

Avchat’s stall was a simple wooden box between and in front of a tailor and a fabric wholesaler, on a broad, curving and ascending street on the east end of the Spill. Behind the tailor and wholesaler, the city’s wall rose up—beyond lay the Serpent Sea, or, if you preferred, the Bay of Ildar, lapping against the base of the wall in a deep stretch between the Shelf and the East Flats. Jobbers in livery Indrajit didn’t recognize paced along the top of the wall and manned the nearby tower.

Avchat himself was an olive-skinned man with a long nose that swiped down at the tip, spreading into horizontal nostrils. His eyes never opened beyond halfway, so that he was perpetually looking through his thick lashes. He wore a sand-colored turban with a brass band across his forehead, the band stamped with characters that presumably announced that he was a scribe. His cheeks were rouged a dark red that matched his full lips, and his body was hidden by a false toga the same color as the turban. He sat on a cushion and held a writing board on his lap. To his left stood a low table covered with other writing implements: paper, a ruler, a wax tablet, a small knife, writing charcoal, ink, and pen. The front of his stall was open, but had a wall that could fold down to close it; the sides and back were hung with charts, letters, certificates, and drawings so layered and overlapping as to entirely hide the wood.

“Let me guess,” the scribe said as Fix barged into his stall. “You want letters written to faraway sweethearts.”

“We need a map copied,” Fix said. “Very precisely. An exact copy. As exact a copy as you might make of, say, a stockholder’s certificate or a risk-merchantry license.”

“An exact copy of a document such as those would be a forgery.” Avchat pursed his lips. “Unless created for academic purposes, of course.”

“It would be,” Fix agreed. “Of course, we just want a copy of a map. But we need it in one hour.”

“An exact copy,” Indrajit said.

“Let me see the map,” Avchat asked.

Fix handed it to him, and the scribe carefully unfolded it and began to open it. He’d only seen a third of it when he shuddered, stopped, and rolled it back up.

“This is a very particular map,” he said.

“Which is about to get an exquisite copy.” Indrajit smiled.

“I could bring trouble on myself by copying such a map.”

“You may not recognize us,” Indrajit said. “We work for the Lord Chamberlain.”

“Are you saying the Lord Chamberlain will protect me?”

“I’m saying that you have two choices: make the map and get paid; or don’t make the map, and get dragged before the Lord Chamberlain as a forger.”

“I’ve heard of you,” Avchat said. “The fish-headed man who patrols the Paper Sook. And his dwarf companion.”

“Dwarf?” Fix snarled.

“My name is Indrajit Twang. I’m Blaatshi, and I do not have the head of a fish. My dwarf companion is named Fix.”

“Dwarf? I’m not even short!”

“It’s because your shoulders are so broad,” Indrajit said. “You look short.”

“Thirty Imperials,” Avchat said. “A perfect copy will take a week. I need to analyze the inks, match not only the colors but also the taste and smell of them. I need to select a piece of paper that can be made exactly to match this one, wrinkle for wrinkle, tear for tear.”

“You have an hour,” Fix said. “We’ll stand here and watch you. Fifty Imperials.”

“Perhaps this time I should handle the money,” Indrajit murmured.

“An hour!” Avchat squeaked. “With the best of intentions, that’s not possible. Give me six hours and let me go home to select appropriate paper and do the work with the shutters drawn. Sixty Imperials.”

“Two hours,” Fix growled, “seventy Imperials, you do it right here and now and you do your very best.”

“I’ll do it.” Avchat sighed. “But I can’t be seen working on this. We close the stall and I’ll work inside—”

“Seventy Imperials!” Indrajit said. “We’ll stand out here and wait.”

Avchat nodded. “Try not to be too conspicuous.” He lit a lamp and placed it in a glass cylinder, then selected a large rectangle of paper from a box in the corner. Removing the two long sticks that held the front of the stall open from their upper sockets, he closed the wall, disappearing entirely into the wooden box.

Two droggers, one a two-humped beast and the other endowed only with a single hump, slouched past, headed up the hill toward the Crown. Their drover, a man with eight limbs, six of which ended in hands, his entire body swathed in cloth like a powder priest of Thûl, cracked three short whips and shouted to keep the beasts moving. A string of chained men wearing loincloths passed the droggers in the other direction, heading down toward water, poked by three Kishi men with goads.

The Protagonists looked at each other.

“Can you sleep?” Indrajit asked Fix. “Pacing back and forth nervously is not going to help you, and the inn isn’t far from here.”

“Could you sleep?” Fix shot back.

“Maybe if I had a few drinks to relax me first.” Indrajit shrugged. “I’m a little worked up.”

“I’m a lot worked up,” Fix said.

“There are enemies hunting us,” Indrajit said. “Look, there’s a tavern across the street. Let’s get a table, slowly sip an ale, and place our backs to a wall for two hours.”

“Watch out!” someone yelled. “Wagon loose!”

Indrajit heard the metallic rattle of rimmed wagon wheels on cobblestone as he turned toward the source of the shout. The wide back end of a freight wagon bounced in a straight line toward him and Fix and the tailor’s shop. Crates jumped and slipped about in the wagon.

Indrajit grabbed Fix by the elbow and yanked him aside, in the nick of time.

The wagon crashed past them and smashed into the tailor’s. The rear axle broke and the crates spilled backward, tumbling into a rough scree like the split rock at the base of a mountain. Yelling burst from the rubble-blocked doorway and the open window, and the three Protagonists found themselves on the edge of a wide-open stretch of street in front of Avchat’s kiosk.

Where was the wagon’s owner, where were its draft beasts? Indrajit turned to look up the avenue to find them, and saw a flash of blue out of his left eye.

Blue.

“Fix!” he yelled, but it was too late.

Fix staggered. A feathered dart had attached itself to his right arm.

On top of the tailor’s shop, a figure in a blue toga and hood turned and ran downhill, leaping onto the next shop’s rooftop.

Munahim raced to the wagon, nocking an arrow to his long bow as he ran, but before he could leap onto it and climb to the rooftop, two men stepped from the crowd. They were swarthy and wore fur caps and vests, which made them look Yuchak. Each had a scimitar and a round wooden shield, and they wore no livery.

Fix pulled out the dart and dropped it to the ground. “I feel woozy. I think I’m poisoned.”

“Deal with them!” Indrajit shouted to Munahim. He lowered Fix to the ground. “Don’t worry, the Blaatshi Epic tells me exactly what to do in this circumstance.”

“Pray to the fish-mother?”

It was good that Fix was talking. It kept him conscious and distracted him. “Blaat is not the mother of fish. She is our mother. I will not stop you from praying to her, she may hear your plea. But no, there is a stock line in the Epic that says, ‘venom of the serpent, venom of the coward’s blade, sucked from the wound and kept from the heart.

As he spoke, he drew one of Fix’s belt knives and found the pinprick wound in Fix’s arm where the dart had pierced his flesh. With the knife’s sharp edge, he cut an X-shape centered on the wound. Blood oozed out.

His superior peripheral vision made it difficult to see what he was doing to the wound, this close up. On the other hand, it gave him an excellent view of what the Kyone was doing. Munahim backed away from the two attackers, quickly loosing two arrows over their heads. They ducked, but charged. He fired a third arrow, which sank into the center of an attacker’s wooden shield, and then cast his bow aside, drawing his long sword just in time to accept their charge.

“Your translations of the Epic all have the same rhythm,” Fix murmured.

“I try to approximate the cadence of the Epic when I am forced to translate,” Indrajit said. “I cannot, of course, replicate the pervasive alliteration, assonance, rhyme, and word play.”

“Word play? You mean puns?”

“A pun is word play as a joke. In the Epic, word play shows us sacred and essential truths. Meaningful connections between things in this world and things in other worlds.”

Indrajit had already talked too much. He leaned forward and sucked blood from his friend’s arm. He’d never done this before, but it wasn’t purely an idea that came to him from the Epic. His uncle had done this to Indrajit once, when he’d been bitten by a venomous eel. Indrajit had lived, and hadn’t lost his bitten leg, despite the dour prediction of his cousin.

Fix’s blood tasted metallic and coppery. Was there another flavor as well? Something dark, bitter, and vegetable? Or was Indrajit imagining it, hoping that he was extracting the venom?

Munahim maneuvered sideways, putting the Yuchak with the arrow-pierced shield between himself and the third man. When the Yuchak swung his scimitar, Munahim parried once, twice, and then on the third parry he stepped inside and pushed the attacker’s weapon back and up. At the same time, he gripped his own arrow, sunk deep into the wood of the shield, like a handle. He rushed into his foe, howling and slamming him into the second Yuchak. Munahim was taller and more heavily muscled than either of his attackers. The man in his grip fell to the ground and screamed as the bones of his forearm broke. The second staggered away off-balance.

Indrajit spat out the blood, then sucked and spat a second mouthful, then a third.

“I feel nauseated,” Fix said. “And my mouth is dry.”

Indrajit rolled his friend onto his side. “Throw up if you need to.”

Munahim tossed the Yuchak with the broken arm aside and raised his sword into a defensive position. “Come, earn your pay with your death, assassin. Learn what it is to attack the Protagonists.”

“Maybe you should take Munahim as your apprentice,” Fix murmured.

“I don’t think he has the head for all the memorization, to be honest,” Indrajit said. “But I’m going to compose some lines about him, that’s for sure.”

“Anyway, he’s good advertising.” Fix vomited weakly.

The remaining attacker gamely moved forward. He and Munahim circled, the Yuchak probing with his scimitar for gaps in the Kyone’s defenses. Indrajit worried that Munahim’s movements were a little slow—he must be as tired as any of them, from lack of sleep as well as from exertion—but he had superior reach, both in arms and in his weapon. The Yuchak pushed in and was repulsed, pushed forward again and Munahim stepped back out of his reach.

Indrajit tore a strip off his tunic and bound Fix’s arm.

“You’re going to live,” he ordered his partner.

“I plan on it.” But Fix lay on the cobblestones, moaning.

The crowd around the fighters had grown. Why were there no constables? At this point, some jobber with the law-enforcement contract should have shown up. But there could be a thousand reasons why they hadn’t. They might have been bribed or distracted. They might be lazy. They might be dealing with some other naturally occurring scuffle or riot elsewhere in the Spill.

The jobbers atop the wall were talking excitedly among themselves and passing coins back and forth. They seemed to be taking bets.

Welcome to Kish.

Munahim’s guard flagged, the tip of his sword sagging. The Yuchak batted the long sword aside with his shield and dove in for the kill. Munahim turned and brought his long sword up, catching the scimitar near the hilt of his weapon. Then he reached over with a boot that looked slow and inexorable, and kicked the Yuchak’s feet out from under him. In the same instant in which the Yuchak hit the cobblestones with his shoulder blades, Munahim drove his sword down through the man’s sternum.

Shouts of joy and disappointment both rained down from the wall.

Indrajit drew Fix to his feet. The shorter Protagonist wobbled, but stood.

“You could have helped!” Indrajit yelled to the jobbers on the battlement.

“Help who?” one shot back. “I was betting on the Yuchak!”

Indrajit joined Munahim, standing over the surviving Yuchak. His shield lay at a strange angle, strapped to his broken arm. Munahim had kicked his scimitar out of reach.

“Too bad your bow shots missed,” Indrajit muttered. “You could have saved yourself a lot of work.”

“I didn’t miss,” Munahin growled.

Indrajit looked downhill, trying to spot the Kyone’s arrows. “Who did you shoot? Were there four Yuchaks at first? I was distracted trying to help Fix.”

Munahim grinned. On his canine face, the expression was predatory and a little unnerving. “I shot the man in the blue toga. I believe the first arrow got tangled in the toga and didn’t wound him. But with the second, I struck him in the approved target area.”

Fix frowned. “The chest?”

“The buttock. I’ll go see if I can find him on the rooftop. Perhaps you two would like to speak with this man.”

Munahim recovered his bow from a pair of children who handed it up to him with a look of awe on their nut-brown faces. Then he pushed past the shouting tailor to scramble up the crates onto the rooftop.

“So.” Indrajit kicked the Yuchak in the hip, lightly. “Now is the time you tell us who wants us dead.”

“Joke’s on you, fish-head.” The Yuchak grinned. His yellow teeth were smeared with blood.

“That’s not a very funny joke,” Indrajit said.

“I know a funnier joke,” Fix told their prisoner. “It involves us opening your belly and seeing how far we can stretch your intestine down the street, while you’re still alive.”

“He’s a little on edge,” Indrajit said. “But that doesn’t mean he’s lying.”

“The joke is that I have no idea who wants you dead.” The Yuchak laughed, a rasping noise. More blood bubbled from his lips.

“I think Munahim might have broken his ribs,” Fix said.

“Dog-headed Kyone, breaker of rib bones.”

“Does it rhyme in Blaatshi?”

“Yes.” Indrajit returned his attention to the Yuchak. “Who paid you, moron?”

The Yuchak wiped blood from his mouth with the back of his hand. “The House of Knives.”

Indrajit’s heart sank. He very carefully said nothing to express his feeling of dismay. “We could kill this guy,” he said to Fix, “but I vote we just take his weapons and his purse and leave him here. What do you think?”

Fix picked up the scimitar, took a knife from the Yuchak’s belt, and cut away his purse. He poked a finger inside to look at the contents. “This won’t cover the seventy, but it will make a nice dent in it.”

“Don’t forget the dead guy’s money.”

Fix lurched over to strip weapons and purse from the dead Yuchak, and Munahim returned, leaping nimbly down the avalanche of crates. “I didn’t kill the man in the toga. But I definitely hit him, there’s blood on the roof. And now I know for sure what he smells like.”

“Is there a trail we can follow?” Fix asked.

Munahim nodded, grinning like a hungry wolf.

“Let’s move Avchat,” Indrajit said to Fix. “If we bring him to the inn, you can watch him. It will only take us a few minutes to get him over there, and then Munahim and I will go chase the assassin while the trail is still warm.”

Fix nodded. “I wouldn’t mind sitting for a little while.”

They walked to the forger’s stall. Indrajit rapped once on the wood. “Danel Avchat, it’s Indrajit Twang. Don’t be startled, I’m opening the stall.”

He lifted the wall to step inside.

Avchat was gone. A panel in the back wall, previously hidden by a large nautical chart, opened onto an alley between the tailor’s and the wholesaler’s.

“Frozen hells,” Indrajit said.


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