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Chapter Three

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The robed man took the two crutches and hoisted himself to his feet. Then he hobbled into the wall. Indrajit scratched his head and Munahim emitted a low whine. Fix stepped forward and followed the man in robes.

“You don’t want to keep being the backup,” Indrajit said. “You’re next.”

Munahim sniffed at the wall and then walked through it. Finally, taking a deep breath, Indrajit pushed himself at the wall—

And passed right through. He stopped for a moment to look at the passage. What had appeared to be a wall was a taut piece of fabric, light and silky. It was solid black, but when Indrajit held his hand up against it on the outside, light projected across the back of his knuckles. Was the appearance of the wall only a projection, then, on a curtain?

He’d seen such illusions before. From magicians.

He shuddered.

He rushed to catch up, joining Munahim on the heels of Fix and the robed man. The robed man moved speedily, despite his crutches. They descended an alleyway between two brick walls: dim light came from bluish spheres set into the right-hand wall every ten paces, but above, Indrajit thought he saw stars. They ignored several turns. Warm, fetid air rose from one; another emitted a cool and steady breeze; from the third, Indrajit thought he heard the sound of running water.

“Are you of the Vin Dalu?” Fix asked.

“That is an excellent way to identify me.”

“Vin Dalu . . . Rao?”

“If you please.”

Indrajit wanted to argue that either the man was the Vin Dalu Rao or he wasn’t, but he wasn’t about to ruin Fix’s chances of getting what he wanted, so he bit his tongue. They descended a stairway into darker gloom and the stars overhead disappeared.

“I don’t know about the Dismembered One,” Munahim said. “I come from the steppes, and we aren’t familiar with this god. Is he one of the gods of the city?”

“The city has no gods of its own,” the Vin Dalu said. “Black Reyiku has been here the longest, but even he, they say, was once a man. An emperor who gave so much justice in life that he couldn’t stop, and continued to guarantee justice in death. Spilkar the Binder is a god of western merchants. Machak the Sea King is a sea god of the south, from Boné and Malik and Hith. Hort was also a sea god, but a sea god of the north, and when the two sea gods clashed, Hort became the Storm Rider. There’s a little science parable there, if you will, on evaporation and on air pressure.”

“I see,” Indrajit said, though the man spoke nonsense.

“And Yispillilu?” Fix asked.

“Also once two gods,” the Vin Dalu said. “Yespa and Lilu. A god of heralds and a god of librarians. But when they met, neither evaporated, and they became instead a single god of seers and lore. And the others: the Lady of the New Moon, Sharazat the Kind, Tlacepetl the Guide, they all come from somewhere else.”

“I have never heard this manner of discourse about the gods,” Munahim said. He seemed thoughtful. “Where does the Dismembered One come from, then?”

“Does he come from somewhere,” the Vin Dalu countered, “or is he just here?”

“You’re saying he is a native god of this place,” Indrajit said. “Indigenous.”

“Aboriginal,” Fix added. “Autochthonous.”

“I see why you’re the bosses,” Munahim muttered. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

The stairs ended in a heavy wooden door under an arch. Here light came from a pipe that jutted from the wall beside the door and spit a constant blue flame. The Vin Dalu raised a brass knocker and clanged it solemnly against its plate, three times. “Is he the god of the place, or is he the place of the god?”

“What?” The word burped out of Indrajit without his intending it.

“Is he a dismembered . . . place?” Munahim was struggling.

“Or is he the dismemberer?”

“You remind me, Vin Dalu, that there were many reasons why I chose not to pursue life as a priest,” Fix said. “But I will endure very large quantities of god-talk and obfuscation if that is the price I pay for you to heal Alea.”

“You may address me . . . any of us . . . as Dalu. And no, that will not be the price.”

The door swung open inward. A second person in a black robe pulled, though the work seemed effortless. Behind the door, the floor was an iron grill, the walls stone slabs, and green light shone up from beneath the floor.

Indrajit followed the others inside, and then the second robed person shut the door. Both men in robes lowered their hoods. Munahim gasped.

They had the same faces.

Or very nearly. They looked as similar as twins might look, but one appeared twenty years older. They might have been a father and his spitting-image son, except that the elder had gnarled limbs and digits, and the younger didn’t.

“Dalu,” the younger man said.

“Dalu,” the elder replied.

“You’re a family,” Indrajit said.

“If you please,” the younger man said.

“What pleases me,” Fix said, “I beg you, is that you heal this woman.”

The Vin Dalu gestured at an open archway. “Please. This is the domain of the Vin Dalu Nikhi.”

Fix went first and the other Protagonists followed. Beyond lay a series of chambers and hallways, and Indrajit quickly lost track of the turns. He found himself standing in a room with steel walls studded with the handles of many cabinets and drawers. Bright white light blazed from tubes that ran along the tops of all four walls. In the center of the room was a flat white table, and above the table, a mirror on a jointed arm loomed, reflecting the white of the table back at itself.

“Please lay the woman on the table,” the younger of the Vin Dalu said. “Let us examine her.”

Fix stepped forward to hoist Alea’s corpse, and staggered at the effort. Munahim and Indrajit helped, and when they had laid the woman’s body out and cut away the sheet, Indrajit looked at his partner. He’d never seen Fix look so frail and so beaten. The enormous muscles across the man’s shoulders and chest looked like weights dragging him down.

“Will the Vin Dalu Nikhi be joining us, then?” Indrajit asked.

The elder of the Vin Dalu smiled. He leaned his crutches against the wall and walked smoothly around the table, as if he had never needed the crutches at all, despite his twisted bones. “Perhaps he is already here.” The two Vin Dalu closed over Alea’s body and began probing it, at first with their fingers, and then with instruments they extracted from drawers in the walls.

Fix rested a hand on Indrajit’s arm. “Don’t get upset at the way they talk in circles. Just think of the great delight you will have in composing epic epithets for the Vin Dalu, when you describe this episode.”

“I have to understand something before I can capture it in an epithet,” Indrajit grumbled.

“Strange,” Fix said. “I didn’t think poetry suffered from that limitation.”

As the Vin Dalu worked, they dragged the mirror in one direction and then the other, using it to examine Alea. At the touch of a control, the perimeter of the mirror began to glow. The mirror seemed to aggregate and direct the light, so that it cast an illuminated beam wherever it was pointed. Subtle controls touched in the sides of the table caused it to rise, sink, lean to one side, and glow. The Vin Dalu poured a caulk-like substance into the open wound in Alea’s belly and then placed a patch over the slash. They dripped two different liquids between her lips and then turned to cabinets in the wall. The older of the two took two glowing green rods from one cabinet and laid them on the table alongside Alea, tucked one on each side between her arm and her flank. The younger of the Vin Dalu dragged a thick blanket made of a dull material that looked more like plaster than like fabric, and covered Alea with it entirely.

More magicianlike procedures.

Indrajit could like and let live with a wide range of men, but wizards made him uncomfortable.

“It’s grown cold in this room,” Munahim said.

It had, though Indrajit had been too fixed on the operations of the Vin Dalu to notice it.

“Come,” the elder of the Vin Dalu said. He took his crutches again and led them from the room by a different door. As if a motivating spirit had left him, his motions again became awkward and ragged.

They entered a room with soft chairs and oil lamps. Had they come far enough that they were no longer underneath the Dregs? Indrajit had lost all sense of time and direction, and half imagined that he could open a window in this room and look directly out onto the Serpent Sea.

“Please,” Fix said.

The elder of the two Vin Dalu sat and gestured at other empty seats. The younger of the Vin Dalu exited by another door.

Indrajit sat. “The Vin Dalu Nikhi?”

“We have done our part,” the Vin Dalu said. “Wait, now, for the Vin Dalu Diesa.”

“Do not ask the magician any more god-talk questions,” Munahim said. “My people killed their gods, and I do not have a head for this.”

“Are you magicians?” Indrajit asked. “Or are you priests?”

“We are keepers of an ancient lore,” the Vin Dalu said. “It warps and wrecks us as it gives us power. We serve, and we propagate ourselves.”

“When I was a boy,” Fix said, “I was a Trivial of Salish-Bozar the White. I was brought here by the Selfless, and I was healed. The Selfless told me that the healing was performed by Druvash craft.”

“You told me this before,” the Vin Dalu said. “I believe all of it.”

“Can you heal my love?” Fix’s voice sounded raw.

“We’ve done the work of the Vin Dalu Nikhi for now,” the Vin Dalu said. “The work of the Vin Dalu Diesa is about to commence.”

“I could have stayed outside,” Munahim said glumly.

“No, this is the clearest thing he’s said yet,” Indrajit said. “Nikhi and Diesa and . . . what’s the other one, Rao? They’re not men. They’re roles.”

“Functions.” Fix seemed to come alive as his mind engaged. “Nikhi is the healer.”

“Wait . . . the Vin Dalu Diesa isn’t the torturer, is it?” Indrajit put his hand on Vacho’s hilt, and then immediately regretted it.

The Vin Dalu smiled.

The younger of the Vin Dalu returned, and he brought a third man with him. The newcomer walked with slow, laborious steps, leaning forward heavily onto two crutches. One of his legs moved with a shuffling, dragging noise across the floor, and the other stamped with a wooden clack. His breathing was a thick, sawlike rasp. He was draped in a black cowled robe, and when he finally dropped himself into a chair, the cowl fell back to reveal a third iteration of the same face, only this one older still by a generation, scarred and mottled as if by burns, with one eye the color of milk.

“Dalu,” Indrajit said. Fix and Munahim hastened to copy him.

The youngest of the three men in robes set about producing a pitcher of wine and cups, serving it first to his colleagues and then to the Protagonists.

“I am the Vin Dalu Diesa,” the old man said. “You are unusual petitioners.”

Indrajit didn’t like the sound of that. “We’re just a humble jobber company. Humble and poor.”

“Perhaps.” The oldest of the Vin Dalu chuckled. “But you are unafraid. Many are deterred from seeking us out, because we are in the Dregs, because we are hidden, because of the things we are said to do. And you are also curious. You ask questions and you think. That is more unusual behavior than you might imagine.”

Indrajit shrugged.

“A Blaatshi poet,” the old man said. “A dissatisfied Kyone.”

“I’m not dissatisfied,” Munahim said.

“And a man in love.” The old man smiled. “If the situation were a little different, we would be inclined to heal this Alea and ask nothing in return. We favor selflessness. We understand commitment, you see, as well as tradition.”

“I will pay what you ask,” Fix said.

“It is not a matter of paying,” the Vin Dalu Diesa said. “She is dead.”

Silence. Indrajit rested a hand on Fix’s shoulder. The shorter man was trembling.

“But your brothers treated her, Dalu,” Munahim said.

“It is possible she may rise again.” The Vin Dalu Diesa nodded. Even his nod was irregular, an off-centered lunge like the peck of a one-legged chicken. “My brothers have taken steps to preserve her as she is now so that we may raise her.”

“Will she be crippled?” Fix asked. “Halt, as you are halt? Is it the Druvash craft that does that to your bodies?”

The Vin Dalu Diesa chuckled. “Are you crippled? Were you burned and disfigured as a boy, when your back was straightened?”

Fix put his face in his hands. He was shuddering. “I beg your forgiveness, Dalu. I thought perhaps—”

“You inferred that it is contact with our Druvash devices that scars us over our lifetimes of service,” the Vin Dalu said. “Your inference is correct. And we cannot say what permanent marks your Alea may bear on her body after being raised. She may be scarred, or twisted, or burned, or bald, or discolored, or blinded, as I am. If so, these would be the prices the Dismembered One demanded.”

“You ask whether I think she would pay the price,” Fix said.

“No,” the Vin Dalu said. “But it is a good question, and since you are asking it, what do you think the answer is?”

“I don’t know.” Fix paused. “I believe that Alea relished power over men. Perhaps she would mourn if she bore marks that reduced her power. Likely, she would be sad.”

“Would it be more kind, then, to let her die?” the Vin Dalu asked.

Fix considered for a long time. “I don’t know for certain. I think she would want to live. But I know something about myself. My friend saved me tonight from being the man who would kill in anger, and he did right. But I must be more than the man who wouldn’t kill in anger—I must be the man who would sacrifice for love. So tell me what the price of your work is, and raise her. And if her beauty is marred by her return to life, and she loses her power over other men, then I can offer her this small consolation: she still has power over me, and she always will.”

“My friend,” Indrajit murmured, “I may be the poet, but you are the poem.”

“You have answered your own question to my satisfaction,” the Vin Dalu Diesa said. “But there remains a potent obstacle.”

“We specialize in overcoming obstacles,” Indrajit said.

“As I said, unusual petitioners.” The Vin Dalu Diesa took a long and noisy slurp of his wine. The youngest of the three Vin Dalu sat now, the three magicians or priests or craftsmen side by side on a wide seat. “We know how to raise the dead, when the dead are recently passed and the body is whole. The Vin Dalu Nikhi have treated Alea’s wounds and prepared her body so that it may receive this gift of the Dismembered One. But the . . . shall we say ‘spell’ . . . ? ‘Prayer’?”

“Procedure, if you prefer,” Fix said.

Most unusual petitioners. The procedure is performed using a number of devices which we have in our possession, and one which we do not.”

“Druvash devices,” Fix said.

“We are not passive custodians of ancient lore,” the Vin Dalu Diesa said. “We are slowly recovering lost technologies . . . crafts and procedures, as you say. And we offer our services to the great families and others to provide for ourselves protection, a space to breathe in as our brotherhood carries out its centuries-old task. We pore over old documents. We descend into the deep to find devices and manuals. We lean on the work of the Hall of Guesses—blindly though they fumble, arrogantly though they award themselves prizes for their terrible ignorance, yet sometimes those scholars open doors. Even the navel-gazers of Salish-Bozar from time to time generate key hints for our work. We learn to repair and operate what we discover, and to build that which we find only described. And our work is not complete. Indeed, it is only just beginning.”

“What’s the one device you require, Dalu?” Fix leaned forward on the edge of his seat, fists clenched.

“A girdle,” the middle-aged of the three Vin Dalu said. “This girdle.”

He handed over a sheet of paper. On it was drawn a picture of a woman. She might have been Kishi or Ildarian; her frame was neither noticeably stocky nor especially slender, and the picture was drawn in black ink. She was naked, but such details as belly button, nipples, and nails were omitted. She was, on the whole, a very sexless woman. Characters were inked around the margins of the page, and lines connected chunks of text with parts of the woman’s body, and parts of the girdle she wore.

Properly speaking, it was more of a vest. It consisted of rectangular pads connected by straps, the straps buckling around the woman’s belly and waist and thighs. Strings emerged from various points of the girdle and seemed to attach to the woman’s skin by means of coin-sized disks.

“Fortunately,” Indrajit said, “Fix can read.”

“I don’t know this language,” Fix said immediately.

“We can only decipher it partly ourselves,” the Vin Dalu Diesa said. “The script is ancient. We give you this unblemished copy because completeness and perfect transmission are a key part of our ethic.”

“What is the girdle’s name?” Indrajit asked.

The middle-aged Vin Dalu rubbed his hands together. “In the manual from which we extracted this image, the girdle has a technical name. But in certain old tales told in Kish, it is referred to as the Girdle of Life.”

“If we bring you the Girdle of Life, you will raise Alea,” Fix said. “With no other price to pay?”

“We will raise her,” the Vin Dalu Diesa said. “And we will charge you no price. We can guarantee nothing about her state when she is raised.”

“Easy enough,” Indrajit said, feeling that nothing about finding the Girdle of Life was going to be easy.

“You must bring us the Girdle within three days,” the middle-aged Vin Dalu said. “This is not an ultimatum we impose, you understand. We do not work to deadlines of days, but to timelines of centuries and millennia. It is a limitation of our craft. In three days, Alea’s body will be too far decomposed for us to raise her.”

“Tell us where to find the Girdle,” Fix said.

“Or where to pick up the trail,” Munahim added.

“Please tell me it’s not at the House of Guesses,” Indrajit added. “Those guys are so tedious.”

“We almost had it in our possession a few weeks ago,” the Vin Dalu Diesa said. “A man claimed to have it, having recovered it from a chamber far beneath the city. An explorer of Underkish, he styled himself, and one of its lords. He offered to sell the device to us, but we could not meet his price, so he kept it.”

“Perfect,” Fix said. “Name the man.”

“Arash Sehama,” the Vin Dalu Diesa said. “The Gray Lord.”


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