Backup
“You really shouldn’t rely on me to say anything that sounds remotely intelligent in this meeting,” Indrajit warned his partner.
“Believe me,” Fix said in his high-pitched voice, “I know. You’re just the backup.”
Both men wore togas. Indrajit’s was a dark orange and Fix’s was a rich purple, with strong notes of blue. They weren’t the false togas that were really just robes, easier to move in and adopted by the merchant class when they wanted to appear wealthy, but wrap-around-the-body-and-pin-over-the-shoulder togas. They weren’t uncomfortable; if he were compelled to pronounce on the comfort of the garment, Indrajit would even have said that it felt good. Air flowed around his thighs as it did when he wore his customary and preferred kilt, and under his arms as it did when he wore the loose tunic he liked, and he felt at ease.
But if he ran, he worried that the toga would slip and trip him. And there was no room in the toga to hide his legendary sword, Vacho, so Indrajit was reduced to wearing a stiletto on a belt wrapped around his thigh.
The thought that he would be unable to either fight or run made the Recital Thane nervous.
Also, he was wearing perfume. It was a floral scent, though he didn’t know the name of the flower.
A bright-blue-skinned wine peddler on the other side of the street caught Indrajit’s eye and started across, the tray hanging at the level of his sternum from a strap around his neck jostling only slightly, the cups not even rattling. He raised a jug in one hand, and his face fell when Indrajit waved him off.
“I’m probably being too harsh on myself,” Indrajit continued. “I mean, when we were investigating those indoors traders last month—”
“Inside trading,” Fix corrected him. “Not indoors.”
“Yes, and I was the one who realized what they were up to.”
“To be fair,” Fix said, “I knew that something was off, since the inside traders in question had already tied me hand and foot and dropped me into a hole underneath their offices.”
Indrajit nodded. “Fortunately, I was able to put two and two together, realize exactly what they had been up to, and come to your rescue.”
“Yes. If by ‘put two and two together’ you mean that you overheard Samwit Conker say, ‘I am very excited to get rich by this inside trading scheme, just as soon as we kill that fellow Fix, whom we have stashed in the basement.’”
“Not in so many words.”
“But almost.”
“I was very pleased to be able to rescue you.”
“I was pleased, too,” Fix said. “I remain pleased. I hope that in the future, every criminal we come up against will have the decency to confess in your presence. It really simplifies the investigative process.”
“Also, when a high level of general culture is required, I’ll contribute.” Indrajit cleared his throat. “But if we need to say something about the horoscopes that were provided to us, I’m right out.”
“Projections,” Fix said.
“Right.” Indrajit nodded. “Papers telling the future.”
“Yes, but not by stars or entrails.” Fix, too, had to forego his usual falchion and hatchet, and wouldn’t be carrying a spear, either. Indrajit didn’t think he had so much as a knife on his person. Still, arms folded over his chest, he seemed at ease. “But the real question is whether what we got is a bottom-up or a top-down projection.”
“I assume we prefer top-down.” Indrajit put on his thinking face, the one he wore to communicate that he understood, that he was taking the conversation very seriously, and he knew the answer to the posed question was likely something sophisticated and nonobvious. “But I am anxious to hear your view.”
“The real point is, did someone just bump the revenue number up five percent each year, or did they actually analyze the underlying business on a contract-by-contract basis, in the light of recent Auction House trends, to determine what they thought would happen, and by chance arrive at a round five percent figure?”
“Correct.” Indrajit touched a finger to his pursed lips.
Fix snorted. “Don’t worry, I’ll do the talking.”
“I’m just showing you that I can fake it,” Indrajit said. “For a little while, at least.”
The two men waited for their palanquin to arrive. The sedan chair was being sent by their master, Orem Thrush, the Lord Chamberlain of Kish, but it wouldn’t bear his horned skull emblem. It would look luxurious and anonymous, as Fix had specified.
To be precise, the palanquin was being arranged not by Orem Thrush himself, but by Grit Wopal, the Lord Chamberlain’s Yifft spymaster. Indrajit and Fix reported to Wopal, not as members of the Lord Chamberlain’s espionage organization, the Ears, but as their own separate unit. They formed a two-man jobber crew, nearly anonymous, with the flexibility to undertake a wide range of missions in and around the Paper Sook.
Of all the places and institutions of Kish, the Paper Sook might be the one Indrajit hated the most.
“You must realize that I value you for qualities other than your understanding of how the Paper Sook works.” Fix raised a hand as the palanquin hove into view around a corner. It was picking them up at a swanky tavern in the Lee, as arranged, rather than at their quarters at an inn in the Spill.
“But I do know how the Paper Sook works.”
“Yes,” Fix said mildly.
The palanquin stopped. Its six bearers were all thickly muscled men with scaly shoulders and four arms. They ran on their legs and on their middle set of arms, which had horny, callused knuckles. A short, thick tail swished back and forth behind each bearer.
Fix crossed to the far side of the palanquin to enter and Indrajit climbed in where he stood, settling himself with a bolster behind his back and a cushion under his raised knees. With his widely spaced eyes, Indrajit could face forward and still see out the door of the palanquin with his left eye, while his right rested its gaze on Fix. Fix, who had a very ordinary Kishi arrangement of his facial features, looked out his door as the six-limbed palanquin bearers picked them up and began to jog toward the Crown.
“What qualities?” Indrajit asked.
“Hmm?” Fix seemed distracted. Outside the palanquin, the Kish evening was lit with torches, oil lamps, and fires. A three-armed juggler tried to rush the sedan chair, perhaps hoping for a gratuity, but the bearers hurled him back into shadow. A scaled Shamb leaped aside to avoid being struck, and hissed an objection.
“What qualities do you value me for?” Indrajit pressed.
Fix cleared his throat. “Well, for one, you’re not needy. You feel very confident in your contributions to our joint enterprise, which makes it always easy to deal with you. I don’t have to be gentle to your wounded vanity, or overstate your excellence. I think it’s easy to underestimate how attractive that quality is in a partner.”
“Yes.” Indrajit nodded. “What else?”
“Well, you’re tall. And you have good peripheral vision.”
“Those traits could prove extraordinarily useful. There is also my knowledge of poetics.”
“Though I understand your poetry sounds better in the original Blaatshi.”
“Everything sounds better in Blaatshi.”
“You’re good in a fight,” Fix pointed out.
“We’re not going to get into a fight tonight,” Indrajit said. “We’re going to pretend to be investors considering funding the joint-stock company of a new jobber band, while actually investigating the promoters.”
“Listen to you,” Fix said. “Talking the language of joint-stock companies so well.”
“You’re trying to distract me.”
“We might get into a fight. This is supposed to be a private pitch session, part of what is sometimes called a road show, so it should just be us and the promoters.”
“And we think they’re from out of town.”
“Wopal thinks they’re foreigners, gathering up local money to pay for an assassination attempt on Orem Thrush.”
“Why not just outlaw joint-stock companies?” Indrajit suggested. “Nip this whole thing in the bud?”
“That would have other consequences.” They passed the Spike, with its cluster of five temples. They were nearly at their destination, now. “Legitimate businesses would be hurt. The assassination organizers would just raise money some other way. And besides, the Lord Chamberlain can’t just make things illegal by decree, he’s not a king. He’d have to get the heads of the other Houses to agree, or at least four of them, and that never happens. And if it did happen, then they’d have to pay the Auction House to inscribe the new law into the legal code.”
“We might get into a fight tonight if the promoters really are crooked, and they conclude that we work for Thrush.”
“Correct. And one way they might be led to conclude that is if there are real investors there, and they recognize us. We’re anonymous in many places in this town . . . ”
“But not in the Paper Sook. Frozen hells.” Indrajit sighed. “If I could pick one place in Kish to be well-known, it wouldn’t be that one.”
“Because all they do in the Sook is yell and trade chits, and that gives you a headache.”
“I know what they do in the Paper Sook. They trade shares in companies and they make bets on the future prices of company shares, and they trade currencies, and . . . Hey.”
“See?” Fix elbowed his partner. “You do understand the Paper Sook.”
“Like I said. It still gives me a headache.”
The palanquin stopped; they had arrived. The two men climbed out.
“But this road-show meeting,” Indrajit said, straightening his toga and looking up at the rectangular palace above them. “It’s not being held anywhere near the Sook.”
“That would be entirely too unimaginative,” Fix said. “The promoters are trying to convince rich men to invest some of their wealth, so they want to radiate wealth and success themselves.” From within his toga, he drew the letter of invitation Grit Wopal had given them. “Ergo, we meet in an elegant building, in a fine old neighborhood.”
The palace porter looked at the seal on the letter and waved the two men toward a staircase at the back left of the building’s inner courtyard. There stood two tall men, bright yellow in color, with narrow eyes, blue on blue, tall feather headdresses, and long spears. The smaller of the two, who had a bent nose and one eyebrow permanently arched high on his forehead, took the letter.
“The Bilzarian Partners?” Bent Nose asked.
“Obviously,” Fix said.
Indrajit snorted his contempt for the process.
The palace was four stories tall and six at the corners, so Indrajit was dreading a long and breathless climb. In the event, they shuffled up two flights of stairs to a landing where two more of the tall, blue-eyed yellow men with spears stood. They patted down Indrajit and Fix both, but the search was perfunctory; another beauty of the toga was that it tended to communicate harmless noncombatant and therefore discouraged the searchers from carrying out their task with too much zeal.
Indrajit followed Fix under an arch, passing from the landing into an airy, high-ceilinged chamber. A low table in the center of the room was laden with food: roasted tamarind, coconut, mango, rose-apples, apricots, cubes of lamb and goat meat on skewers, a soft white cheese, flatbreads. A pitcher of chilled tea sat surrounded by huddled stone cups. Surrounding the low table were reclining couches and divans piled high with cushions. To Indrajit’s left was a taller table, on which rested an open ledger beside an inkpot and a quill.
Two yellow spearmen stood in each of two arches exiting the room.
Beside the low table stood two Xiba’albi men, one wearing a gold collar and the other wearing multiple gold rings. Both had gold hoops in their ears.
Beside the ledger stood a lavender-skinned Zalapting with a small hump on his back and a gray beard. He wore a simple tunic and kilt, gray in color, and the gray of his tunic and beard and the fading lavender of his skin blurred into a nondescript bland smudge. Beyond him and the table bearing the ledger was an open doorway leading to a balcony. Potted palmetto plants on the balcony muffled the street sounds rising from below.
“Mr. Bilzarian?” one of the Xiba’albi asked.
“Yes,” Indrajit and Fix both said.
Oops.
“We’re brothers.” Indrajit smiled.
“Different mothers,” Fix said to the immediately raised eyebrows.
“And we’re an exotic race of man,” Indrajit continued. “Our appearance varies widely.”
The Xiba’albi both bowed deeply. “We are but the subscription agents,” one of them said. “Give us a few minutes, and we will bring the issuer out to meet with you. In the meantime, please refresh yourselves. The tea is delicious.”
The Xiba’albi swept from the room in a tinkle of gold.
The Zalapting cleared his throat.
“Do we know each other?” Indrajit asked.
The Zalapting inclined his head, a stiff gesture. “I have some familiarity with many of the professionals of the Paper Sook.”
Indrajit smiled, but he wasn’t sure whether the Zalapting was intimating that he might be a threat. Was he saying he knew that Indrajit and Fix were not who they said they were? Or was the Zalapting bluffing? Or just being polite?
“Perhaps the Bilzarian Partners would care to examine the company’s registry while they wait?” the Zalapting suggested, tilting up the book beside him to show the present page.
Indrajit waved fingers, feigning indifference to cover the fact that he couldn’t read. This was a good sign, though—it might mean that the Zalapting didn’t really know who he was.
Fix peered at the page. “I see.”
The Zalapting replaced the book on the table and shifted from foot to foot.
“So . . . you don’t work for the issuer, then?” Fix asked.
“I’m a notary’s clerk,” the Zalapting said. “I’m just here to witness in case any shares are transferred tonight.”
Indrajit stretched himself out on a divan and took a handful of apricots. Fix glared at him.
“What?” Indrajit asked.
“We just ate . . . and drank,” Fix growled. “How can you still be thirsty?”
“Just having a few pieces of fruit,” Indrajit said. “To be polite. Welcome to Kish: eat when you can.”
His words seemed to irritate rather than calm Fix, and then the shorter man was stalking across the room. “Perhaps you would like to read the register yourself,” Fix grunted.
Fix knew very well that Indrajit couldn’t read. Indrajit was an oral poet, who could spin out thirty thousand lines of his people’s Blaatshi Epic on the toss of a coin, but couldn’t read a word of any language. Fix knew this, and had mocked Indrajit repeatedly for all of it.
What was Fix getting at, suggesting Indrajit might like to read?
“Fine,” he said, and as he stood, he reached for the tea.
“I’ll get that.” Fix knocked the pitcher over, spilling tea across the table.
“How clumsy,” Indrajit said, waving fingers again to feign . . . being rich, basically. “We shall have to subscribe to more shares, to make up for the tea we have spilled.”
The large yellow men looked impassively at him.
“Yes,” Fix said, “that’s no problem. But first, come take a look at this.”
The Zalapting stepped aside and Fix drew Indrajit close to the registry volume.
“What are you trying to say, Fix?” Indrajit murmured under his breath.
“That it’s past time you learned to read, for one thing!” Fix snapped.
“This is an awkward time and place to have this argument.” Indrajit looked over his shoulder at the nearest yellow spearman and smiled.
Fix jabbed his index finger into the blue ink swirls written on the page to which the registry was opened and lowered his voice. “What our new Zalapting acquaintance here has written is, ‘The tea is drugged.’”
“Frozen hells.”
“The Bilzarians.” These words came from behind them, but they were spoken by a familiar voice.
“Samwit Conker.” Indrajit turned around.
Conker was a Wixit, one of the most common races of man in Kish. If Wixits walked on all fours and kept their mouths shut, they might easily be mistaken for some forest-dwelling species of beast, or pets of Kish’s wealthy. Wixits were furred, and looked rather like ferrets. Some might even find them cute.
But Conker stood upright, on his hind legs, on the back of a divan. His hands were on his hips, and he appeared to be in no mood to keep his mouth shut.
“Fix Bilzarian,” the Wixit said. “The last time I saw you, I was locking you in my basement while I decided what to do with you.”
“Apparently, you decided to sell me shares,” Fix said.
“Wrong.” The Wixit shifted his gaze to Indrajit. “And Twang Bilzarian.”
“Indrajit is my first name,” Indrajit said, “if you care.” He longed for his sword.
“I don’t. I do care that my rather elaborate plan to drug you and feed you to my lizards has been thwarted.”
“You were exiled from Kish,” Fix said. “Kish can stand its share of murder and robbery, but your insider trading scheme made the Lord Stargazer lose a lot of money.”
“I was too enthusiastic.” Conker curled his lips back to show his teeth. “I got greedy.”
“I bet he just put a leash on his own neck,” Fix continued, “and had one of those Xiba’albi walk him through the gate like a cat.”
Samwit Conker arched his back and hissed. “I am no one’s pet.”
“Or just curled up on some prostitute’s lap, pretending to be a handbag,” Indrajit continued. “You’d be a good handbag.”
“Kish is as porous as a sponge,” Conker said. “Nothing easier than to move in and out.”
“Welcome to Kish,” Indrajit said, quoting one of the dozens of epigrams featuring the ancient city’s name. Some bore wisdom, others humor, but most of all, they told hard truths about the hard city. “Or not, as you please.”
“Today the answer will be not.” Conker raised an arm and spun one finger in a quick circle. This gesture summoned the yellow spearmen to surround Indrajit and Fix. More of the men slipped from the arched doorways in the process, and Indrajit and his partner found themselves detained by eight warriors.
“You came in through Underkish, didn’t you?” Fix asked. “Through the tunnels?”
The Wixit squinted at him. “Why do you say that?”
Fix shrugged. “You stink.”
Samwit Conker laughed.
“Welcome to Kish,” Indrajit said. “Hold your nose.”
“Kill the Zalapting,” Conker ordered.
One of the spearmen turned and took a step in the clerk’s direction, but Indrajit reached out and touched the man on the chest to restrain him.
“Hey,” Indrajit said.
Three spearpoints pressed into the flesh of his chest and arm.
Indrajit swallowed, his throat dry. “You don’t need to kill that guy. He’s not going to tell anyone anything and he can’t stop you. No point in making more enemies than you have to.”
Conker stared at Indrajit. “So the clerk is one of Wopal’s Ears, too?”
Indrajit shook his head. “None of us are the Lord Chamberlain’s Ears. Fix and I are jobbers, you know that. The Protagonists.”
“Ah, yes.” Conker’s smile was cold. “The heroes. And you don’t want me to kill this innocent registry clerk.”
“Just let him go. Or tie him up if you need to.”
“He’s only a Zalapting. In the time it takes me to kill him, they’ll have bred a thousand more.”
Indrajit grinned. “Just because he’s short, it doesn’t mean his life is worthless.”
Samwit Conker snarled, but then his snarl broke down into a tittering laugh. “You’ve got wit, Twang. Perhaps when we are done, I’ll keep you. Blinded and gelded, chained to a pit in my throne room, forced to entertain me until you die.”
“When you say ‘throne room,’ I imagine you squatting on a hat box.”
“Tie them up all up,” Conker said to one of the yellow men, a fellow with a taller headdress than the others wore, full of white and purple feathers. “Leave them conscious, if possible.”
Indrajit ground his teeth as the yellow men bound his hands behind his back. The fabric of the toga at his shoulder tore around the pin of the brooch as they handled him, but it didn’t rip all the way through. “Good move,” he told the Wixit. “Hold us for ransom. And you can use the registry clerk as a little kicker during negotiation, if the Lord Chamberlain doesn’t want to meet your demands.”
“Yes,” Samwit Conker said. “Something like that.”
Then spears in Indrajit’s back prodded him forward.
The captain of the yellow men went first, followed by Fix. Two yellow men held Fix, one gripping each arm, while a third walked behind him, holding a knife to his kidneys. Then a single yellow warrior dragged the Zalapting, and finally three brought Indrajit along.
“Where are you brightly colored fellows from, anyway?” Indrajit asked.
“Why do you care?” Samwit Conker snapped. He must be bringing up the rear.
“Indrajit is probably trying to compose an epithet,” Fix said.
“I’m wondering whether I already know one,” Indrajit countered. “I don’t recall anything about men with yellow skin, but there is an epithet that goes, Tall men and feathered, who sail the Sea of Rains. So I would be interested to know if you guys are from Thûl or Xiba’alb or somewhere near the Sea of Rains.”
“On second thought,” Conker said, “I’m going to have to kill you. Nothing else will shut you up. Do you never tire of this, Fix?”
“When it seems tedious,” Fix called over his shoulder, “I just try to imagine how Indrajit feels when I explain option contracts to him.”
“I understand option contracts,” Indrajit protested. “That’s the one where you sell something you don’t actually own, right?”
The Wixit cackled.
“Close,” Fix said.
They passed through several rooms with weighted silk curtains. Indrajit could smell the sea. At the back of the apartment, a blank door of solid yetz-wood was shut by a thick iron bar. The captain heaved the bar up with visible effort and set it aside. When the door opened, it revealed a narrow chute lined with orange bricks, leading down. Faint yellow light rose up the shaft. Iron ladder rungs bolted into the bricks provided a means of descent—
For a person with free hands.
“Do our ways part here, then?” Indrajit asked.
For answer, the yellow captain pushed Fix into the chute.
Indrajit’s short, muscled partner fell, but landed on his buttocks on the floor, legs jammed down the chimney and hands behind him.
“Get a move on,” the Wixit growled.
“His hands are tied,” Indrajit protested.
“He has shoulders and feet,” Samwit Conker said. “And I only need one of you to survive, anyway, so if he falls and dies . . . it’s your lucky day.”
Fix scraped his way down the chute, grunting with effort and pain. After a minute of listening to his partner’s efforts and imagining flesh being scraped off by old brick, Indrajit heard the dull thud of Fix falling to the floor at the bottom of the shaft.
The yellow captain went next, much easier.
“It isn’t far!” Fix called up from the pit. “When the wall starts moving away behind you, just drop!”
Indrajit seated himself at the chute before he could be forced to sit. There was only one yellow warrior in the chamber below—if Indrajit could get his stiletto into his hand and surprise the man, this might be his and Fix’s best chance to make their escape. He felt the cold weight of the weapon, and the pinch of the belt around his thigh as he scooted forward.
“At least untie the Zalapting,” he said as he probed with one sandaled foot for his first hold. “What’s he going to do, attack your eight huge mercenaries with his bare hands?”
“We are a ferocious people,” the registry clerk said, “driven by our inborn wildness to war. War proves which Zalapting men are fit mates, and war also keeps the population down. All our poetry exalts war, all our childhood play trains for it. We are driven by our mad bloodlust until the Turning.”
“Then what happens?” Samwit Conker asked.
“We become even more ferocious.”
The Wixit laughed. “Twang is right. Untie the Zalapting, or he’ll break his neck.”
Indrajit heard the cords around the clerk’s wrists being snipped as he lowered his weight onto the iron-rung footholds and sank into the chute. He felt the skin of his shoulders being scraped raw as he used them like feet, inching downward with his weight first on one shoulder and then on the other.
He tried to keep his legs together, without appearing that he was trying to keep his legs together. He didn’t feel especially self-conscious about another man seeing up his toga, except that today he wore a secret knife wrapped around one thigh.
He almost lost his foothold twice.
Then, when his head was maybe three cubits below the surface of the floor above him, he felt the wall behind him begin to bow out and away from him. Smooth, time-gnawed brick gave way to a rougher surface that cut into his flesh. The chute was opening into a room.
“Drop!” Fix called.
Indrajit let himself fall. He landed on his feet, feeling the hard impact through his soles and his legs and crashing into his pelvis, knocking him to one knee. But the knife stayed in place and his toga stayed on.
He stood.
“Get up,” the yellow captain said, prodding Indrajit in the shoulder.
Indrajit stood. He and Fix and the yellow man were in a brick chamber that seemed to suffer from centuries of neglect; bricks lay heaped in the corner, and gaps in all the walls showed where the bricks might have fallen from. Light came from an oil lamp that burned in the corner; the slight flicker of its flame testified to the presence of an air current, but there were no windows, and the only other opening was the mouth of a second chute in the floor.
“We are from Boné,” the yellow captain said in a low voice. “We are Udayans. We come from the hill country, and we serve only the greatest noblemen.”
“Why are you satisfying my curiosity,” Indrajit asked, “if you only plan to kill us?”
“They don’t plan to kill us,” Fix said.
Indrajit snorted. “We aren’t worth much ransom.”
“They want us to do something,” Fix continued. “My guess is an assassination.”
The captain of the yellow warriors gave no hint that the guesses were at all correct. He stepped to the other side of the steel rungs bolted into the bricks, keeping his spear pointed at the Zalapting clerk for the last few cubits of his descent.
“That’s sort of a funny joke, on Conker’s part,” Indrajit said. “Luring us to this meeting, thinking we were going to prevent an assassination, and then trying to make us carry one out. Do you think the Lord Chamberlain is the target?”
“It’s a good guess,” Fix said. “Maybe they hold one of us prisoner to force the other to kill Thrush.”
“Or maybe they send the Udayans with us, we commit the murder together, and then the Udayans leave, and we’re left behind to take the punishment.”
Fix watched the yellow man closely. “Or they murder us on the scene, so it looks like the Lord Chamberlain killed us in self-defense.”
“These scenarios all sound bad for us.” Indrajit sighed. The Zalapting clerk reached the floor and padded over to join Indrajit and Fix. The captain didn’t retie the clerk’s hands. The yellow warrior stayed beneath the chute, looking upward and calling instructions to someone who was now beginning to climb down. “I apologize for not asking earlier, but what’s your name?”
“Tufo,” the clerk said.
“What was that you were talking about, the Turning?” Indrajit asked. He kept a close eye on the yellow captain, who, for his part, was looking intently up the chute, engaged in a conversation in a language Indrajit didn’t understand. Indrajit’s hands were tied behind him, but he was able to gather up a large handful of toga material, which was in any case coming loose from movement, and from the brooch pin tearing through the toga fabric. Leaning forward slightly and yanking, he managed to ruck the cloth up around his hips, exposing his thighs and, he hoped, the dagger strapped to one of them.
Which he couldn’t mention verbally.
Fix helped, though, raising one foot off the ground to point at Indrajit’s weapon.
“You smell nice,” Tufo said.
“It’s a flower,” Indrajit said. “I forget the name.”
“It means,” Tufo said, “that when we become too numerous, so that war does not prune our numbers and our warrens can no longer hold us, something happens to our births. Our males are then born overwhelmingly homosexual.”
Tufo missed the stiletto in the dark and started patting around on Indrajit’s thigh.
Indrajit felt exposed. “I . . . ah . . . ”
“What an interesting way to keep your numbers in check,” Fix said. “‘Homosexual’ means that the men are attracted to other men, Indrajit.”
“I know what homosexual means.” Indrajit cleared his throat. “Can’t you see it?” he hissed. “A little higher. Not there. Are you saying—is that happening now, the Turning?”
“No. The warrens of Kish are large, and there is much violent work among the jobber companies to keep the numbers of our males pruned. We have relatively few homosexuals in these times.” Tufo finally found the stiletto and drew it. “I am one, of course.”
Indrajit let his toga drop around his legs.
“You said you become more ferocious in the Turning,” Fix said.
“We homosexuals are noted for our savage prowess in combat.” Tufo cut through the rope around Indrajit’s hands with a single firm motion, then moved to stand behind Fix. Indrajit held the sliced bits of cord around his wrists, trying to maintain the appearance that he was tied.
The person coming down the chute was Samwit Conker himself. He was nimble, as Wixits generally were, but the iron bars were large for his small hands, so the yellow captain took care to stand beneath him, prepared to break his fall. Conker himself focused on his hand- and footholds.
Tufo walked around to stand beside Indrajit, hands behind his back. Presumably holding the stiletto there. Indrajit couldn’t ask for his knife back, but he was about to reach over and take it when Conker dropped to the floor, and the Wixit and the yellow Bonean both turned to face Indrajit and his companions.
“They almost figured it out,” the yellow captain said to the Wixit. “But then they got distracted talking to the Zalapting about how ferocious Zalaptings are.”
Samwit Conker laughed. “Oh? How ferocious are Zalaptings, then?”
Tufo attacked without warning, leaping at the yellow warrior. As the larger man tried to step aside, Tufo reversed the stiletto and slashed it through his right hamstring. Shrieking a string of syllables in his foreign tongue, the warrior sank to his knees. He tried to bring his spear into play, but it was too big to get between him and the Zalapting.
Conker leaped forward, and Indrajit kicked him against the wall.
The Wixit bounced, snarling and yapping. Indrajit’s brooch pin chose that moment to finally eat its way through the cloth of the toga and the garment collapsed around Indrajit’s body, tangling his legs and tripping him.
Indrajit stumbled. He stood at the edge of the shaft in the floor, arms flapping as if he might take flight.
Tufo wrapped his left hand in the yellow warrior’s hair, stepped onto the man’s thigh to raise himself, and plunged the stiletto up to the hilt into the man’s throat. Blood spattered across the brick floor, the Zalapting, and Indrajit.
Fix grabbed Indrajit’s toga and yanked. He pulled the poet back from the edge and Indrajit reeled across the room into the far corner. The toga pulled away from Indrajit’s body into Fix’s hands, and Fix turned, holding the cloth up.
Tufo grabbed the dead man’s spear and looked up the chute. A second warrior was descending, yellow legs vivid in the flickering lamplight. Above them, shadowed movements suggested the presence of a third, coming down the shaft. Tufo braced himself.
Samwit Conker leaped at Fix, fangs bared and limbs splayed, a raucous war-shriek unrolling from his lungs.
The second yellow warrior dropped, and fell impaled through the chest on Tufo’s spear. He died with no sound other than a heavy thud as he and the Zalapting fell over sideways.
Fix swung the toga like a net. He wrapped it around Conker, snatching the little furry man from the air and wrapping him entirely into a squirming bundle.
Indrajit found himself wearing only a loincloth and sandals, with an empty knife sheath strapped to his thigh. Tufo climbed out from under the dead Udayans’ bodies, straightening his disheveled clothing, and Indrajit started to laugh.
A voice called down from above in an unknown language.
“Your two friends are dead!” Indrajit yelled back up. “And we have your employer tied up in a sack. Time for you to go home!”
He eyed the descending shaft. Presumably, it must drop below the level of the street, into the Underkish—the sewers and other passages that honeycombed the enormous hill, part natural and part man-made, built of the accumulated detritus of millennia—beneath the city. Presumably, the yellow men or the Wixit knew a route through that maze that would have let them attack Orem Thrush, which meant that they probably also knew a way out, but Indrajit didn’t want to put a single foot down there, if he could help it.
At least, if he had to, he’d go armed. He unbuckled the sword belt of the yellow captain and then rebuckled it around his own waist. He took a spear in hand, too, though in his life, he had mostly used spears for fishing.
Tufo kept the stiletto, saluting Indrajit with it by touching it to his eyebrow.
Fix handed Indrajit the bundle of toga cloth. Indrajit gripped the balled cloth firmly, letting the excess material fall over his elbow; the Wixit squirmed inside, and Indrajit buffeted him gently with the knuckles of his other hand. “I’ve got a blade now, Conker,” he whispered. “Hold still, or I will cut you.”
Fix armed himself, pulling the bloody spear from the yellow corpse and belting a sword around his shoulder.
“Let the Wixit go,” a voice from above called, “or we’ll come down and make you regret it.”
“Oh, yeah?” Indrajit laughed. “We killed two of you unarmed! How much damage do you think we’ll do to you now that we have your friends’ weapons?”
“Counteroffer!” Fix shouted. “Get out of here, and we’ll leave you alone!”
“No!” Conker shrieked, the sound muffled by the toga. Indrajit boxed the bundle lightly and was rewarded with an angry hiss.
The murmur of discussion drifted down from above.
“What do you think came of those Xiba’albi?” Fix whispered.
Indrajit frowned. “I assumed they were just hired to lure us in, and then left. You don’t think maybe they’re down there, do you?” He pointed at the shaft leading down.
“We have no idea what’s down there,” Fix said.
“Right.” Indrajit nodded. “And we don’t know the way. Underkish is an impossibly complicated maze in three dimensions.”
“But Conker probably knows the way,” Tufo said.
Indrajit stared at the Zalapting. “What kind of notary’s clerk are you?”
“I work for Wopal,” the clerk said. “I was here as your backup.”
“Backup?” Indrajit harrumphed. “Do we always have backup?” He looked at Fix for an answer. “When did we ever have backup before?”
Fix shrugged.
“All those things you told us about Zalaptings,” Indrajit said to Tufo. “You know, warrior poems, and the Turning, and you being . . . an especially ferocious sort of Zalapting.”
“All true,” Tufo said.
“We’d better be more careful around Zalaptings,” Fix suggested.
“You two are also quite ferocious,” Tufo said. “I wouldn’t worry too much.”
“We’re not ferocious,” Indrajit objected. “We’re the good guys.”
Conker snarled and thrashed about in his cloth cage.
“We haven’t been paid,” a voice called down. Indrajit peered up the chute and saw light from the floor above, unobstructed by any bodies, so whoever had been in the process of climbing down the shaft had thought better of the idea.
“Not our problem!” Indrajit called back.
“It is your problem, because you’re holding the man who owes us!”
Indrajit rapping a loving knuckle where he thought Samwit Conker’s head was. “Don’t think that we’re going to just let him come on up to you. We like having him as a hostage!”
More murmuring. “We could allow you to ascend. We would promise not to hurt you.”
Indrajit met Fix’s gaze and frowned. “The more you talk, the less I trust you!” he yelled. “You could just stab us as we climb up!”
“I’ll pay you myself!” Conker shrieked. “Ten Imperials, I’ll lead you out through the tunnels, and then you let me go!”
“Well, that’s odd,” Indrajit said softly. “Why would you pay us? I’m pretty sure you planned to kill us.”
“Because if we give him to his yellow boys,” Fix said thoughtfully, “he knows they’ll shake him down for more. Since he hasn’t got the assassination he wanted in any case, he’s just trying to get out alive at the cheapest price.”
“But he might have more fighters in the tunnels,” Indrajit said. “The Xiba’albi, or someone else.”
“I have no fighters in the tunnels,” the Wixit said.
“Maybe a trap,” Fix suggested.
“I have no traps, either.”
“It would be nice to get paid,” Indrajit said.
“Twelve Imperials!” Conker cried.
“We could climb down in there with you!” an upstairs voice called. “You could leave the Wixit with us and climb out!”
“I don’t trust you not to attack us as soon as you have Conker!” Indrajit shouted. “I’m pretty sure that’s what he’d want!”
“The hole in the floor is looking better all the time,” Fix said.
“What if you all climbed down unarmed?” Indrajit yelled.
“That’s not going to happen!” the unseen Udayan called back.
Indrajit lowered his voice and stepped in close to Fix and Tufo. “We seem to be at an impasse.”
“We can take our chances with the hole in the floor,” Fix murmured.
“I’ll still pay you ten Imperials!” the Wixit squeaked.
“I have a plan,” the Zalapting said. “Perhaps we should be careful to bind the Wixit’s mouth shut before I say any more.”
<scenebreak>
Cho’ag Yoom was the youngest of the eight Udayan warriors who remained in this ancient, rotting city. They had been the bodyguard of a pasha, once, but he was dead and their numbers had dwindled from their former thirty-six (to match the thirty-six houses of the night sky) to eight, as the pasha’s enemies had driven him from his lands across the Serpent Sea, and then to this city, and then had made repeated assaults on the pasha before he finally took his own life, leaving his prized Udayan warriors to become mercenaries.
And perhaps only six remained, if the fish-headed man and his companions were to be believed. The gods had hated the Bonean pasha so much, they had not been content to kill him alone, but were now sating their last appetite for vengeance upon his bodyguard.
Leaning on his spear and waiting, with his five companions, for the fish-head’s answer, Cho’ag shook his head.
Cho’ag was a member of the band only because his uncle Zhan had chosen him and sworn him in. Zhan was the headman of the band. Cho’ag had survived under Zhan’s protection, only gaining tentative acceptance, if that, from the other warriors, and now Zhan was likely dead.
A scream sounded from the chamber below. “No!” a voice shouted. “Don’t leave me here, they’ll kill me!”
“That doesn’t sound like the fish-headed man,” Hakk said. Hakk was the senior surviving member of the band, and had been their spokesman in communicating down the shaft. He had a bent nose, and low cunning.
“Please!” the voice called up the shaft. “The two jobbers are running! They’re fleeing down into the tunnels with the Wixit, who promised them ten Imperials! Please don’t hurt me!”
“This could be a trap,” Churt suggested.
“Yes,” Hakk said. “That is why we will send Cho’ag.”
Five spears dropped to level at him, and there was no arguing. Cho’ag took his spear into his left hand and looked down into the shaft. Seeing the Zalapting looking up at him, covered in blood, he eased himself into the chute and rapidly descended into the chamber below.
A flickering lamp sat on the edge of a second shaft that dropped farther, in one corner of the orange-walled room. In the center of the room stood the Zalapting clerk, flailing his arms. Near the foot of the ladder, obscured by shadow and blood, lay two bodies. Cho’ag couldn’t see their faces, but he saw their Udayan headdresses; one bore the purple and white headman’s feathers.
“Uncle Zhan,” he murmured, and sighed.
The Zalapting pointed down the hole. “They left me!”
“Do you live, mighty Cho’ag?” Hakk called down from above.
Cho’ag did not appreciate the sarcasm. “So far!”
He knelt to examine the corpses. These were the bodies of his uncle Zhan, and of his former fellow guard, Ferut. Strangely, Ferut’s loincloth was missing. Barbarians. “Safe sailing, Uncle,” he murmured. “I will sing for you when next I see the Celestial River.”
Hakk now climbed down the ladder. “Why are you not pursuing the fish-head down the hole?” he demanded.
Cho’ag stood. “I was saying farewell to my uncle.” He crossed to the opening of the second shaft and began to climb down it. His feet descended below him into darkness, and he imagined the feeling of spears stabbing into his flesh with each step.
“Shall I kill the Zalapting?” Hakk sneered.
“As you wish,” Cho’ag said. “But if you want to be useful, hold the lamp so I can see where I climb.”
He didn’t wait for Hakk, continuing his descent into darkness.
<scenebreak>
“They are gone,” Tufo whispered.
Indrajit and Fix dropped the toga. They’d been holding it up to screen themselves from view, standing in the darkest corner of the chamber and counting on the orange dye in the toga and the orange brick of the wall to blend enough, in the shadow, to escape notice.
It had worked.
Samwit Conker’s muzzle was bound shut with the loincloth of one of the dead yellow men. Indrajit had held the Wixit close to his chest with one hand while all six warriors had passed through the chamber on their way down, making certain the Conker was still, and was still breathing.
Only a trickle of light came up from the shaft in the floor; the Udayans had taken the light with them.
“Up the ladder quickly now,” Fix said. He led the way.
“We bar the door once we’re through,” Tufo added, following.
“I have thought of an epithet,” Indrajit announced.
“This,” Fix said, “this is why I like being your partner. Tell us the epithet.”
Indrajit cleared his throat, climbing the iron rungs out of total darkness toward the square of light where Fix and Tufo now waited, the squirming Samwit Conker clutched under one arm. “Yellow-skinned Udayans,” he chanted, “blue-eyed and deadly.”
There was a brief pause.
“It probably sounds better in Blaatshi,” Fix said.
“Everything does,” Indrajit said. “This epithet, in particular, is highly alliterative.”
“Perfect,” Fix said.
Indrajit handed the Wixit to his partner. Once they had climbed out of the chute, they barred the door.