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Chapter Eleven

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They debated briefly whether they should deliberately make the forgery wrong, and decided that such mischief could clearly get them into trouble. At the same time, it was hard to see what advantage could come from it, in the absence of a specific plan to deceive one of the Gray Houses.

In the end, they instructed Avchat to make the most accurate copy he could.

Fix and Munahim slept first, then Munahim woke up and spelled off Indrajit.

The winter nights of Kish were long. When he awoke, Indrajit estimated on the basis of the amount of lamp oil and wick consumed, that half the night, six hours, had passed. Avchat had produced a second map.

It was not a forgery; Indrajit could easily tell them apart. The inks were very slightly different colors and the paper of the copy was heavier and less tattered at the edges. But the point was not to fool Arash Sehama, the point was to fool Zac Betel, and Betel surely must not know the map as well. The shapes all looked the same, both the lines marking the streets and walls of Kish and the characters that even Fix admitted he couldn’t fully read as well as the lines and characters that showed up under lamplight.

And “fool” wasn’t quite the right word anyway, since they were giving Betel the information he was asking for. They were just keeping a copy for themselves, for now.

When Indrajit awoke, Fix leaned on the wall beside the window and Munahim rested against the door. Avchat fidgeted nervously in the chair at the table, sucking the calluses of his fingertips.

“We need to keep the forger under wraps,” Fix said.

“Is this where we debate the choice of throwing him to the Ghouls,” Indrajit said, “or drugging him and stowing him in the hold of a ship bound for Togu?”

“You have such a romantic imagination,” Fix said. “A knife would be cheaper and faster.”

“I won’t say anything,” Avchat said.

“We like to extend trust,” Indrajit told the scribe, “but the stakes are really high right now.” He turned to his partner. “What if we gave him to Wopal to hold?”

“We’d have to walk him up there and back,” Fix said. “That’s a lot of delay, and a long time of us exposed to enemies potentially seeing us.” He nodded at the foot of the bed, and Indrajit now saw a coil of rope. “I say we just tie him up here, pay for two days’ rent, and leave him.”

“What if you die?” Avchat asked.

Fix shrugged. “Then you get out in two days, when the innkeeper rents the room to someone new.”

“Do we leave the money with him?” Munahim asked. “He might get robbed. By the innkeeper, if not by someone else in the meantime.”

“Good point,” Indrajit said. “We’re going to hold the twenty Imperials, Avchat. Don’t worry, they’re yours when this is over. Unless, of course, you go around telling more people about our map or our business.”

“What if you die?” Avchat asked again.

“In that case,” Indrajit said, “I think you’re out the twenty Imperials.”

Indrajit knew knots, and quickly tied the scribe to the two rings in the wall. Fix improvised a gag from a strip of the bedsheet, and then they set out for Zac Betel’s smithy.

Dawn was still four or five hours away. None of them quite felt rested, but they each drank a ladleful of water from a safe well on the Crooked Mile and they chewed strips of dried beef that Indrajit bought at a dried goods store, open late in a plaza filled with torchlight where two separate caravans were loading up beasts of burden for a journey, and they felt somewhat recovered.

Fix held the forgery, rolled in his hand. The original map was carefully folded and hidden in Indrajit’s tunic.

They cycled forward and back as they walked, taking turns moving out ahead and then standing and watching for pursuit as the other two caught up. There were too many people who might be following to even think through the possibilities all at once, but Indrajit didn’t see any tails, including anyone shadowing them on the rooftops adjacent to the Crooked Mile. The other Protagonists confirmed that they, too, saw nothing, and they soon reached Betel’s shop.

Betel was no longer at his anvil, but the fire still burned and three men in leather aprons stood watching the surrounding streets, apparently idle. Two were Kishi and the third was a Wixit. Indrajit noticed that each man had a smudge of soot in the same place alongside his nose, the Wixit’s hard to tell from a streak of sandy-colored fur. Behind them, in the yawning shadowy gullet of an open doorway, he thought he saw the bottom two steps of a staircase leading up to the two stories above the smithy.

“We’re here for Zac Betel,” Fix said.

“He’s asleep,” the Wixit said. “Come back at dawn. Better still, an hour after dawn.”

“This is urgent,” Indrajit said. “Who runs the Sootfaces when he’s not around?”

“He’s around,” the Wixit said. “He’s asleep.”

“He has to have a minister . . . seneschal . . . aide . . . someone,” Fix said. “If something big happens and he’s asleep, do you just wait until dawn?”

“You think you’re something big happening, do you?” The Wixit chuckled.

The two Kishi chuckled, too. They were lightly armed, each wearing a falchion at his belt and studded leather bracers on his legs and forearms. They looked a little like gladiators dressed to fight in the Racetrack on a Pit Day.

“We stole something he urgently wants,” Fix said. “And I urgently need what he promised to give us in return.”

“That’s a lot of urgents,” the Wixit agreed. “Come back at dawn.”

Indrajit took a deep breath, mustering his most persuasive arguments.

“Here’s what’s going to happen,” Fix said. “I will count to three. Then I will kill both your men here, and then I will pick you up by the scruff and carry you upstairs, yelling Zac Betel’s name until he comes out. He’ll be pretty angry with one of us, I expect, and I’m quite willing to wager it will be with you.”

“You don’t want to pick a fight with Zac Betel,” the Wixit said.

“I think he might be okay with it,” Indrajit said.

“One.”

“You know he’s a Gray Lord, right? The great families are afraid of him.”

“We’re not afraid of him.” Indrajit shrugged. “We have a deal with your boss.”

“Two.”

“Are you insane?” The Wixit’s voice jumped an octave in pitch. “The Lord Marshal personally pisses his boots when he hears Zac Betel’s name. What could possibly be this important?”

“Love,” Munahim said.

“Three.” Fix drew his falchion.

Metal hissed all around as the two Kishi drew their swords, and Munahim and Indrajit did the same.

“Whoa, whoa, stop,” the Wixit said. “Okay. I’ll go in and get Yammilku. He’s the night warden.”

“At last, we understand each other.” Fix smiled. “We’ll go in together.”

The Wixit appeared to be about to object, but then he looked around at all the naked steel. “We’ll go together. Dag, Hober, you two, stay here. Everyone . . . calm down, put the swords back.”

Indrajit sheathed his sword cautiously, in time with the others, but he kept a hand on the hilt.

Fix loomed over the Wixit and for a moment Indrajit thought he might make good on his threat to snatch the small man up by the scruff of his neck. He didn’t, but he pressed close, as if to communicate his sense of urgency by leaning over the little thief. The Wixit led them into the open doorway, up a single dark flight of steps, to a door. Light leaked out underneath, and the Wixit knocked a soft, complex pattern of raps. Then he opened it.

A man sat beside a table. The table was heavy with papers, weighted under old horseshoes, but the man wasn’t reading papers. He leaned away, over a bucket, and ran a whetstone along the blades of a long, straight sword. He wore a kilt, a chest harness of leather straps and buckles, and knee-high leather boots. His head looked like that of a hawk, with a piercing yellow eye, a bright yellow beak, and golden-brown feathers shooting straight back from the top of his skull to give him a crest. The golden-brown feathers gave way to smooth skin of a very similar shade, taut over rippling muscles. A smudge of black soot ran along one side of his beak. An oil lamp burned on a stand in the corner. The room had no windows.

“Yammilku, the Night Warden,” the Wixit said.

“Indrajit and Fix,” Yammilku said. “And their one hireling.”

“We’re famous.” Indrajit nodded.

“We only need one hireling because he’s so mighty,” Fix added.

“You’re Heru,” Indrajit suggested. “Bright-eyed Heru, longing for the upper sun, keen of eye, sharp of beak, no winds avail them.”

“You may leave,” Yammilku said. The Wixit bowed and stepped out, closing the door behind him.

“This is interesting,” Indrajit said. “The Sookwalkers had a very definite look to them. Gray cloaks. You do, as well, but it’s sort of . . .”

“You look like gladiators,” Munahim said.

Yammilku laughed, a piercing sonic attack. “You would fit in.”

“My face is too clean,” Munahim said.

“We can change that.”

“Do all the Gray Lords have uniforms for their men?” Indrajit asked.

“It’s not crazy,” Fix said. “Jobber companies do.”

“The great houses do,” Munahim said. “And the temples.”

“Yeah, but . . . thieves,” Indrajit said. “Don’t the Gray Houses want to be sneaky?”

“Sometimes,” Yammilku said. “Sometimes we just want to hire someone to be sneaky for us.”

“Ah-ha,” Indrajit said. “So Betel did leave someone in charge who knew about our deal.”

“He expected you to come back.” The hawk-headed man wiped oil off his blade with a rag and sheathed it in a scabbard lying across the desk. “Show me the map.”

Fix handed over the forgery. The Heru unrolled it on the table and gazed at it. “Do you know what this map is?”

“We do,” Fix said. “Tell us who you sold the Girdle of Life to.”

“You’ll understand if I check the authenticity of the map first.”

Fix and Indrajit nodded. Indrajit resisted the urge to touch the real map, folded up in his kilt pocket.

Yammilku took the lamp from the stand in the corner. Holding the map up with one hand, he passed the lamp close to it. When the drogger-milk ink lines appeared, he sighed, a rumbling sound with a hint of a sharp squeak in it.

He replaced the lamp and map. “Zac Betel instructs me as follows,” he said. “He sold the thing you seek to Philastes Larch. Philastes is the Archegos Minor of the diplomatic mission of the Paper Sultanates. He lives in the Sultanates’ embassy.”

“On the Street of Fallen Stars,” Fix said. “With the walled garden containing a grove of duckfoot trees and thamber oaks.”

“Just so,” the Heru said.

“What does a diplomat want with a Druvash artifact?” Indrajit asked.

“You called it the ‘Girdle of Life.’” Yammilku shrugged. “Who doesn’t want life?”

They left Betel’s smithy and climbed the Spill again, south, toward the peak of the city.

“We could keep the map,” Indrajit said. “Learn to read it. It would be useful, don’t you think? To be able to move freely beneath the city? Or at least, more freely than we do now. It could be worth a lot to be able to move from one quarter to another without having to pass through a gate.”

“I thought we’d give the original back,” Fix said. “To placate Arash Sehama. I don’t really want to have more enemies than I absolutely have to.”

“I agree.” Indrajit nodded. “We could buy another copy from Avchat and then give Sehama the original.”

“Of course,” Fix said, “since we’ve given away the secrets of underground travel to the Sootfaces already, giving back the physical map might not be enough to assuage Sehama’s irritation with us.”

“Think positive,” Munahim said. “We’re on our way to get the Girdle of Life, and heal your lady love.”

Fix grunted. “I’ve thought twice in the last twenty-four hours that I was going to get the Girdle. At this point, I will believe it when I see it.”

“So if the map marks secret roads,” Indrajit said, “think of them as underground highways connecting one quarter to another . . . then yes, we’ve just added traffic to those roads by giving a copy of the map to Zac Betel. But just having us three also using the roads, that’s not a lot of traffic. No one should notice or care.”

“It might not just be highways,” Fix said.

“What else it is?” Indrajit asked.

“What if the map marks treasure caches?” Fix suggested. “Or secret entrances into the Sookwalkers’ territory? Or entrances into good targets, like, say, banks. We might have given the Sootfaces ways to attack or undermine the Sookwalkers that we can’t even imagine.”

“We really should give the map back as soon as we can,” Indrajit said. “At least the Sootfaces should be happy with us. Speaking of not wanting to have too many enemies, that is.”

“You’d think so,” Fix said. “On the other hand, what if Yammilku or Betel decided that it was a good idea to kill us, so we couldn’t tell the Sookwalkers that we’d made a copy of their map?”

“This is why we need to keep a copy ourselves,” Indrajit said. “Because right now, I would like to be walking on secret roads and out of sight.”

“Except that the enemies we’re talking about both have access to those same secret roads,” Munahim said glumly.

“Right.” Indrajit grabbed Vacho’s hilt. “Keep an eye on the rooftops for that blowgun-wielding bastard.”

“Or gray cloaks,” Fix said.

“Or gladiators,” Munahim added. “Or cats.”

“Or silk scarves?” Indrajit asked.

“Silk scarves,” Munahim suggested.

“Well, we’re going into Silkstepper territory now,” Fix said, “so watch out for anyone tailing us or setting an ambush. Whether they’re wearing silk scarves or not.”

Gannon’s Handlers had the gate. A trio of Zalaptings hissed in staccato unison as if they were laughing, but the rival jobbers waved Indrajit and his companions through.

Once they were past, the Handlers blew raspberries and jeered.

The Street of Fallen Stars was not the longest street in the Crown, nor the widest. It was thought to be one of the oldest, which was a distinction in a city that was, as far as Indrajit could tell, thousands of years old. Maybe more than that, tens of thousands. Maybe millions. In the Epic, Kish appeared in a famous episode after many generations of Blaatshi history, but as a city that already existed and was an Imperial capital.

The Street of Fallen Stars did not have the aggressive, breathless fashionableness of, say, the Boulevard of Poses, which housed theaters and dance halls a few minutes’ walk from the Fallen Stars. It had an air of controlled decay, its sprawling manors had enclosed gardens and fountains behind their gates, and were inhabited by old money—not old power, such as the Lords possessed, but mere wealth, that now wanted to shut itself away from the noise and filth of the rest of the city and spend its money in easy living for generations. As time gnawed its way inexorably through the institutions of Kish and wealthy families fell one by one into poverty, their manors were purchased by others, and the mansions on the Street of Fallen Stars were often bought by foreign embassies.

Many of the families had their own guards and all of the embassies did. Some of those guards wore family or national livery and some were hired jobbers, but the street crawled with armed men at all hours.

Therefore, Indrajit, Fix, and Munahim made their way down the street by stealth. At the corner of Fallen Stars and Bank Street they found a rickshaw pulled by a one-hump drogger, in turn led by a scaly purple man with no visible eyes. He was whatever race of man had also spawned Yozak, Frodilo Choot’s doorman, but Indrajit didn’t know what the race was. The rickshaw was wide enough for the three of them, being designed as a pleasure model. They burrowed beneath three slightly tattered blankets, Munahim ruminating gloomily on the likelihood of insect infestation in either the cab of the rickshaw or in the blankets. Then they pretended to be sleepers, or possibly entwined lovers, with their faces concealed beneath rucked-up hoods made from the edges of the blankets.

Indrajit watched his side of the street, whispering observations about men on watch as he saw them. When Fix called that they were in front of the Sultanates’ embassy and was it a good time to jump, he told his companions, “Wait . . . wait . . . now,” and while the Gund in house livery across the street turned and looked back through the gate he was watching, they slipped from the rickshaw and onto the cobblestones.

A thamber oak rose from the street in front of an iron fence, punctuated by stone pillars. Fix raced up the twisted and interlacing branches of the oak. Indrajit crouched between the oak’s bole and the wall, trying to stay in the shadow cast by the many intersecting rivers of lamplight streaming sluggishly from the gardens and the porches and the poles all along the street. Once Munahim called down that he was positioned, Indrajit dragged himself up the tree as well.

“When we eventually get around to making a list of all the requirements necessary for joining the Protagonists,” Indrajit said, “we must include strong climbing ability.”

“Where would we embody such a list?” Fix asked.

“Why must we embody it?” Indrajit asked. “What kind of list has a body?”

“I mean, how shall we make sure we don’t forget it?”

“I have a strong memory,” Indrajit said. “How about you? Are you worried that your memory isn’t strong enough to remember, ‘Must be able to climb’?”

“I’m only saying that there are other ways to capture the list, in addition to just using our memories.”

“Not good ones,” Indrajit said.

They surveyed the embassy.


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