Chapter Fifteen
Once Munahim confirmed that the shaft in the chimney opened into Underkish, Indrajit smashed up the legs of a second table. The lamp had gone down with Munahim, but the fire in one connecting hallway that burned around the edges of the table, blocking the entrance to the square chamber, gave Indrajit light to help Fix and then the two archegoi, first major and then minor, into the crack. They had to climb upward first, over a crumbling brick wall into a slot that was nearly impossible to see in the shadow of the chimney, and detected only because of Munahim’s keen sense of smell, and then down through that slot into a parallel chimney that descended.
Thudding sounds and the shaking of the door to the outside showed that the Silksteppers had realized that the Protagonists were not coming out, and set about trying to make their way in. Indrajit also heard yelling elsewhere in the building.
Once everyone else was in the chimney and well on their way down, Indrajit began to make his way. He piled the smashed table in the fireplace and climbed up into the slot. Splashing half of his flask of lantern oil on the stacked wood and on a last piece he held back for himself, he then set fire to the fragment, and tossed it on the pile.
Fire whooshed up into the chimney and Indrajit scrambled down the shaft.
If the Silksteppers had anyone positioned at a high point outside the kitchen, they might simply have watched Indrajit set the fire. And if anyone in the embassy knew about the shaft down, they might realize that the fire in the fireplace was a screen to hide the Protagonists’ flight. But if neither of those things was true, then maybe Indrajit had bought himself and his friends some time.
The interior of the shaft was initially rocky and irregular, but then become a smoothly structured wall resembling vertical steps or a ladder. Alternating rows of bricks jutted out or were set back deeper into the wall, giving very comfortable hand- and footholds for descent or ascent.
Which was good, because Indrajit judged the descent to be a chain or maybe a chain and a half in length. At the bottom end, it landed inside a three-walled niche in the corner of a wedge-shaped brick chamber with a trickle of black sludge flowing across the floor.
Indrajit pointed at the sludge. “It’s good to know that all Kish’s neighborhoods have the same grimy underside.”
Fix held the lamp to the map. “I think there’s more here than written thieves’ cant,” he said. “I think there are symbols that have meaning, but there’s no legend.”
“Like, ‘water here’?” Indrajit suggested. “‘Do not drink the sludge’?”
“Probably,” Fix agreed. “But also, I suspect that these five hashmarks are meant to give an indication of the height of the climb we just did. And the warning that there’s fire at the upper end would be necessary for a map user coming from below, to burgle the palace. You’d see the fire icon and you’d bring something to extinguish it with, or you’d fireproof yourself somehow.”
“You’re saying that the fire glyph wasn’t put there to tell someone how to find the entrance,” Indrajit said. “It was put there to warn a burglar so he could avoid burning his sandals.”
“I think so.”
“Well, take us home by the straightest road you can find,” Indrajit suggested.
“I’m taking us to the Dregs.” Fix tilted the map and looked at a different section of it. “Where there’s some writing I can’t read, but it just might be a connection to the Vin Dalu’s complex.”
“Faster,” Thomedes Tunk pleaded. He leaned against a wall, spitting trickles of dark saliva onto the brick floor.
Larch tugged at Indrajit’s elbow. “I worry about the archegos major.”
“Yes,” Indrajit said. “He’s full of wasps.”
“I worry that moving him will make the birthing faster.”
Indrajit sighed. “Of course it will.”
“We’re not alone,” Munahim said.
“Ghouls?” Indrajit asked. “Kattak?”
Munahim hesitated. “They’ve been here, but no. Men.”
“How many?” Indrajit asked.
“Not many.”
“Could they be beggars, sheltering from the rain?” Indrajit asked. “Or a servant sneaking home from an unapproved romantic liaison?”
“I can’t tell that,” Munahim said. “But I can smell men and weapon oil.”
Indrajit and Fix unsheathed their swords simultaneously. “We’ll go fast,” Fix said. “This way.”
They stepped over the trickle of sludge and entered a narrow crack between sagging walls. Tunk didn’t move at first, so Indrajit grabbed him by the back of the Girdle of Life, gripping the Druvash device where two straps crossed and snapped together under the shoulder blades. At the crack, Indrajit spun the senior diplomat sideways and shoved him through, one hand on his shoulder and one on his hip.
Was he fatter? That wasn’t right, his shoulder felt downright bony.
But his belly seemed to be swelling before Indrajit’s very eyes.
Beyond the crack, a void opened to their right, floor dropping away and ceiling rising out of sight as brick gave way to natural stone walls. Great walls of paper slanted down at multiple angles, quickly concealing all from view.
“I smell Kattak,” Munahim said.
“I smell decay,” Indrajit countered.
Tunk vomited.
Fix tore a strip from the hem of his kilt. He soaked the end of the cloth in lamp oil and then lit it. He tossed the upside-down fabric taper into the pit and they watched its sphere of yellow light draft down into the abyss.
It came to rest on the rotting bodies of men.
“We fed them slaves and prisoners,” Larch said. “They pushed the bodies through a hole in the floor of the guest house.”
“How many?” Indrajit asked.
“Many,” Larch said. “In recent days, more. This is not what I aspired to as a young man. This is not what I thought I would do, entering the diplomatic service. My world has become a horror.”
“Welcome to Kish,” Munahim said.
The paper rattled. Shadows of beasts concealed within flitted across the surface.
“Not good enough to house their eggs, but not so bad they couldn’t be eaten, eh?” Indrajit took deep breaths to fight off the urge to vomit and continued after Fix, who was already shuffling away.
Fix led them through a series of sharp turns. They walked along a perfectly preserved marble stoa, its pillars carved in the shape of gods and demons Indrajit couldn’t identify at all, down a narrow staircase, around a torrent of dirty rainwater crashing down into a bowl of shattered red gravel, and across a needlelike arching bridge that leaped over echoing darkness. At each turn, and every fifty or so paces otherwise, Fix stopped to consult the map, muttering, turning it this way and that, and pressing the lamp or his face close to it to get a good look at particular glyphs and lines.
Tunk was no longer able to stand, and Indrajit dragged him by main force, holding onto the Girdle of Life. Larch stared at Tunk and shuddered.
Fix stopped and stared at a column.
“What is it?” Indrajit hoisted Tunk close under his arm to prop him up. “Are we lost?”
“Look at this pillar,” Fix said. “What do you see?”
“White stone,” Indrajit said.
“It’s bone,” Munahim said. And it was. And a series of curving columns just like it ran leftward from where they stood. Beyond and facing them ran a parallel row of columns, both rows curving inward and nearly meeting at the top, where they supported a roof of packed clay.
“It’s a rib cage,” Indrajit said.
“This is your chance, Fix,” Indrajit said. He jested more to relieve his own fatigue than to actually tease his friend. “Take this to the Hall of Guesses and become a scholar. Or take it to the ashrama of Salish-Bozar. They’ll probably let you weigh up each bone, measure it, calculate the angles, and you can probably draw a thousand pieces of useless information out of this skeleton right here. Maybe two. Really get you a strong start toward becoming a Selfless.”
Fix chuckled gamely. “Except this skeleton is supremely useful.”
“It holds the roof up, for starters,” Munahim pointed out.
“And it’s a landmark.” Fix held up the map. “This glyph definitely reads ‘bones.’ We go left.” He raised the lamp and looked along the skeleton. “If I’m not mistaken, our next step is to climb through that eyehole over there.”
Munahim wrinkled his nose. “I think we’re about to hit a real river of sewage.”
“Yeah.” Fix held up the map. “There’s a thick line just beyond the eyehole. I won’t read you what the glyph says.”
Fix went first, raising the lamp and holding the map in his other hand. The ribs floated past him right and left like the pillars of the long nave of a temple. At the far end, as if a giant animal had once punched its head through a wall and then died on the spot, brick and stone sealed up one eye cavity and stopped forward progress to either side of the skull, but the lamp shone on empty space through the second eye socket.
Fix climbed through and stood examining the footing as the others joined him. “It’s not a river, it’s a pool,” he called. “There are stepping stones that cross the pool, but the level is rising fast. Probably the rain. We need to go now, or it will get foul.”
He put the map into his kilt and leaped to the first stone, just as Indrajit stepped through the eye. Indrajit stood on a shelf of wet stone. Water seeped through a stone ceiling above and flowed down over the giant skull and trickled under his sandals.
Fix had leaped out onto a second stone, and Munahim now followed his path, jumping from the shelf to the first stone. The gaps weren’t great, maybe four cubits for each leap, and the stones were large and flat and more or less dry. But Larch teetered at the edge, breath coming faster and faster as he stared at the rising sludge at his feet.
“You can do this,” Indrajit said. “It’s easy, one small jump at a time. Just let the others get ahead of you and then go. And if you miss the jump, you just get a little dirty. Small price to pay.”
“There could be rapeworms down there,” Larch said.
“There could be worse things than that,” Indrajit suggested.
Fix leaped ahead another stone, and then another. “I can see the other side,” he called.
Munahim followed him.
“Go,” Indrajit said.
Larch jumped, and missed. He fell with a heavy splash into the grimy waters, screaming and thrashing with all limbs, and knocking himself farther from the foothold.
“Try to stand up!” Indrajit called. “It might not be that deep!”
“Help!” Larch squeaked.
“Frozen hells.” Indrajit sighed, steeling himself to jump into the slime.
Thwack!
With the meaty sound of metal striking flesh, Tunk shuddered and fell back. Indrajit lost his grip on the Girdle of Life. Looking down for one brief instant, he saw a thin cable passing right before his own chest, a cable that ended in an iron harpoon, the harpoon sunk into Tunk’s ribs. Looking along the line in the other direction, he saw it disappear into darkness.
Then the line was violently tugged, and Thomedes Tunk flew off the shelf and into the sewer.
The two archegoi moved in opposite directions, Larch thrashing his way away from Indrajit to the right and Tunk speeding like a captured whale to the left. Tunk floated on his back, moaning, his belly a white mound bobbing on black waves.
Indrajit leaped into the slime to go after Larch. To his enormous relief, his feet touched bottom and his head didn’t go under, despite the wave of black, coagulating sludge he threw up. “Fix!” he yelled.
With his excellent peripheral vision, he saw Fix leap first onto the stone where Munahim stood, pressing something into the Kyone’s hands. Then he leaped into the slimy flood. He was shorter than Indrajit, and maybe not as lucky, and he disappeared into the black goo briefly before emerging, striking out toward the harpooned archegos major.
Indrajit grabbed Larch by the hair. The archegos minor screamed and punched Indrajit in the jaw, prompting Indrajit to punch him back. “Stop!” he roared, when he had regained his balance and composure. “Hold still, I have you!”
Larch didn’t stop shrieking and he stiffened like a log, but he quit thrashing about and he didn’t hit Indrajit again. Indrajit grabbed him and dragged him back toward the shelf.
Munahim had dropped to one knee on his rock and was loosing arrows into the darkness. Fix’s lamp still shone, sitting on the stone at the farthest point to which Fix had advanced before turning back. Screams came out of the darkness in response, and then crossbow bolts whizzed back. Munahim took a bolt in his left arm and grunted in pain.
“Help . . . me . . .” Tunk cried, weakly spitting out black ooze, his face bobbing alternately above and below the dark water.
Fix grabbed Tunk by an arm and was pulled along, toward the edge of the light. At the same time, the pulling party pulled itself forward, so just before Fix disappeared completely, a large flatboat emerged from the shadow. Ten men crouched in it, and two more lay flat with arrows in them. Four of them were pulling to drag the archegos major aboard their boat, five were reloading crossbows, and the last stood with a long, barbed spear, aimed as if he were about to thrust it into Fix’s face.
It was the Heru, the hawk-headed lieutenant of Zac Betel, Yammilku.
“I will kill you if I must!” the Heru cried.
“I will die for her!” Fix snarled.
At that moment, Thomedes Tunk’s belly burst open.
Kattak nymphs swarmed from the hole up onto the archegos major’s face as he screamed one last wet, choking time. Others spilled down along his belly. Two raced along Tunk’s arm and onto Fix, and then the arm ripped off. Other nymphs crawled up the harpoon; the men in the boat hesitated, but then, as Fix fell away, holding a torn-off arm, they dragged the ruins of the corpse into the boat.
“Take the harness!” Yammilku shrieked.
Fix pushed off the bottom and swung the severed arm like a club. He struck Yammilku in the chest, spattering the Heru with blood, but gore was also spouting in a fountain from the ruined chest of Thomedes Tunk.
“Fix!” Munahim shouted.
Indrajit saw what the Kyone saw: that the thieves with crossbows were raising them to fire again. Indrajit dragged himself and the archegos minor behind the nearest stepping stone. The waters were rising, but he could still stand with his face above the surface, and he could shelter from the bolts behind the rock.
Munahim dropped his bow and dove. He tackled Fix, dragging the shortest Protagonist down into the water again just as the crossbows twanged.
Indrajit heard the snap of several bolts striking the stone behind his head. He dragged Larch up to the rock. “Hold on here,” he urged the archegos minor. “Grip the rock, stay above water, and just wait.”
Then he slipped around the stone. He moved on the far side of the stone from the lamp that still lit the scene, keeping his head in shadow. Two men in the flatboat were reloading crossbows again, but the rest had picked up poles and were pushing themselves into the darkness.
“We’ll give you back the harness, Fix,” Yammilku called from the shadow, even as he was disappearing. “We need you to come perform a small job for us.”
“Damn you!” Fix was howling. Even in the dim light, he looked as if he had turned bright red. Munahim held him up above the rising waters, and might also be holding him back. “Give it to me now!”
“Meet me at the Petting Zoo,” Yammilku called, now completely shrouded in the gloom. “By the mernache grove. At dawn. That gives you two hours to clean up.”
Fix roared. When the sound of rage and injury had finally echoed to nothing, the swish of the flatboat moving across the water was gone as well.
Fix stared in the direction the boat had gone. Munahim dragged him to the nearest stepping stone and pulled him out of the flood. Indrajit fished Larch out onto another stone.
Munahim collected his bow and the map. He handed the latter to Fix, but then held onto it when Fix continued to stare into darkness without responding. Indrajit hopped to the next stone to collect the lamp.
He ached, but he knew Fix hurt in ways he did not.
“Fix,” he said gently. “The Petting Zoo . . . that has another name, doesn’t it? Isn’t that the same as . . .”
“Yovila’s Gardens,” Fix said.
“I didn’t know Kish had a zoo,” Munahim said. He was scraping gobbets of mud and worse from his skin with his belt knife. “And you can pet the animals?”
“It’s not a zoo like that,” Indrajit said. “It’s a park. People go there to, uh, pet each other, I suppose you would say.”
“It’s in the Lee,” Fix murmured.
“That’s right,” Indrajit said. “Kind of in the shadow of the Racetrack. Obviously, Fix, we need to head that way. We should probably clean up.”
Fix stared.
“It’s still raining,” Munahim said. “That won’t be hard.”
“We got the Girdle once,” Indrajit said. “We’ll get it again. We need you to focus. For one thing, look at the map and find us an exit.”
Fix suddenly hunched over, tensing all the muscles of his chest and stomach and curling his arms. He looked like a wrestler, warped into a tight knot and ready to spring, and he emitted a deep, echoing bellow.
Then he took a deep breath and slowly exhaled. “Give me the lamp and the map.”
Fix ran the flame near the map and then pointed. “Some of the ink is running, but I can still read this. Back the way we came. I think there’s a passage that will take us under the city walls and into the Lee.”
They hopped back to the stone shelf and stepped through the giant skeleton’s eye socket. Indrajit and Munahim both went out of their way to crush the several Kattak nymphs on the shelf, grinding them under their sandaled heels. When they reached the cascade of water pouring from the ceiling, they stepped into it and rinsed off, forcing Larch to do the same. Eventually, after folding the map and putting it away, Fix brought them up in a heap of rubble, the remains of a large building that had formerly stood just inside the wall of the Lee.
“Where can you go?” Indrajit asked Larch.
“With you.” Larch trembled as he spoke.
“Do you need money?” Indrajit asked.
“I’m going with you,” the archegos minor said again. “I’m not safe alone.”
“You’re not safe with us,” Fix pointed out, but Larch only shivered and said nothing.
In the blue light preceding the dawn, Indrajit bought a strip of cloth and herbs identified as potent for healing in the Epic. Together, the Protagonists pulled the bolt from Munahim’s arm and bound his wound. Then they bought four wool cloaks at a caravan supplier and walked toward Yovila’s Gardens.
“Who are we meeting in this park?” Munahim wondered out loud. “And why in the Lee? This isn’t Zac Betel’s territory.”
Indrajit looked at the lightening sky in the east. “We’ll find out soon.”