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POWER & PRESTIGE

D.J. Butler

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The city of Kish is ancient, built on the bones of thousands of civilizations that came before. There is power in those ruins, for those with the skill to dig it up. But power corrupts, or so they say, and Indrajit and Fix are about to learn that some powers are better left buried....


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“I feel I should warn you,” the man with the doglike face said. “There’s a possibility I may eat my feces.”

“That’s it,” Indrajit said to his partner. “We’re not hiring this guy.”

Fix frowned. “Why do you say there’s a ‘possibility’? Remind me your name...Munahim?”

The three men sat at a table in the common room of the nameless inn where Indrajit and Fix rented a room to serve as both their sleeping chamber and the headquarters of their two-man jobber company, the Protagonists. The barkeep, a broad-shouldered Kishi with a black topknot and tattoos of snakes across his shoulders, was polishing his counter. A messenger stood in the doorway, shifting from one foot to the other. The sounds of camels and gulls drifted in through the windows.

Given the heat, all five men wore simple kilts.

Munahim nodded, the motion making his long ears bounce and his eyes fill with liquid. “I’ve done it before. I’m not proud of it, but you know, there it is. If it’s going to happen, I want you to know about it in advance.”

“You make it sound like an impersonal phenomenon,” Indrajit said, “like rain. It might rain, so you should be warned. I might munch on my own waste, so don’t be surprised. How about you just choose not to eat your feces?”

“I get caught up in the moment.” Munahim hung his head.

“Speaking of the moment,” Indrajit said to Fix, “we don’t have any moments left. We need to get over to the Hall of Guesses and look at that hole in the basement, now. We don’t have time for this guy.”

“Wrong,” Fix said mildly. He was shorter than Indrajit and stocky, with a high-pitched, womanlike voice. “We don’t have time for any other jobber. But since we’re already interviewing Munahim, and he happens to be a tracker, he’s the one person we have time for right now. It’s just a bit of good luck that we happened to be interviewing Munahim when a job offer came through.”

“We really must go.” The messenger from the Hall of Guesses nodded anxiously in the doorway.

Indrajit scowled at Munahim, who was nearly as tall as he was, and similarly rangy. “Can you track by smell?”

Munahim nodded.

“But I mean...really well? Are you good at it?” Indrajit pressed.

“I’m the best,” Munahim said.

Indrajit sighed. “Okay, here’s the offer. If we get this lecturer back, you get one share. Fix and I each get two. No promises that we retain you any longer term than that, but consider this a trial period. Does that work for both of you?”

Fix nodded.

Munahim held out a hand to Indrajit. Indrajit hesitated, uncertain exactly how this dog-headed man might eat his own excrement and whether his fingers were really clean, but then clasped his hand around Munahim’s forearm.

“If I see you eating your own waste,” Indrajit growled, “or anybody else’s, you will not get paid, and this will, by every frozen hell, be a onetime engagement.”

The messenger from the Hall of Guesses was a very ordinary-looking Kishi, skin coppery brown and hair cut short like an upside-down bowl. Indrajit might have lost him in the crowd, but for the vermilion color of the messenger’s kilt. Indrajit loped ahead of his partner, Fix, keeping an eye on both Fix and Munahim with his excellent peripheral vision. All three men were armed: Indrajit had his leaf-bladed sword, Vacho; Fix had an ax and a falchion at his belt; and Munahim had a long, straight sword slung across his back.

“Have you worked in a jobber company before?” Fix asked, continuing the interview.

“I was a mercenary,” Munahim said. “We fought in Ildarion for two years.”

“And then gave up?” Indrajit asked over his shoulder. “Didn’t like the life of living and dying for contracts, eh?”

“I didn’t think I was really fulfilling my potential,” Munahim said. His voice had a mournful quality, consonant with the melting look of his face. The fur covering his muzzle and forehead and running in a tapering diamond down his shoulders and back was black, as were his nails, and his skin was a grayish-blue. His eyes were golden brown. “I’m a tracker, really, and all the Ildarion barons wanted from me was to swing a sword.”

“We definitely want to use all the skills of all our team members,” Fix said.

Indrajit grumbled without words.

“Did you read that we were looking for men in one of our posted notices?” Fix asked.

“I can’t read,” Munahim said.

“Ah, excellent,” Indrajit said. “Finally, a point in his favor.”

“I wouldn’t mind learning,” Munahim said. “It seems very useful.”

“That’s interesting,” Fix mused. “I suppose I could teach you. I could teach everyone we eventually hire into the Protagonists. You never know when reading might come in handy.”

Indrajit grumbled wordlessly again.

The climbed from the alley off the Crooked Mile up through the Spill, through clouds of spice and smoke that smelled of fish. Alleys and side streets shot off in all directions like the strands of a spider’s web, but the messenger picked the shortest route upward. The walk was steep and Indrajit worked up a sweat.

They passed through the gate, held by jobbers in yellow tunics, and into the Crown. Here the merchants were fewer, the buildings were larger, and the plazas were pleasant with green amalaki trees, ketakas, and aloes. A troupe of actors on a corner recited famous dramatic speeches, jugglers on another leaped upon each other’s shoulders and wrestled flaming torches up and down into the afternoon sky. As they approached the solid block of buildings that comprised the Hall of Guesses, walled off within its own stone curtain, complete with battlements and arrow loops, Indrajit found himself grinding his teeth. He wasn’t quite sure why. He didn’t object to the scholars of the Hall of Guesses cutting open dead bodies and pressing plants between panes of glass and whatever else they did.

He did find it somewhat silly and effeminate that they felt the need to write it all down, and to take it all so seriously.

The messenger took them through the front gate of the Hall of Guesses. The men on guard here weren’t jobbers, but warriors on the payroll of the Hall itself. They wore vermilion kilts and tunics and leaned on long spears. They glared at Indrajit and his colleagues, but when the messenger shouted a few words of authorization at them, they stepped aside.

Indrajit had imagined that the interior of the Hall of Guesses would be a single large courtyard, with tall buildings standing around the outside, against the wall. Instead, the center of the fenced-in area was filled with numerous buildings, the height of the outer wall or shorter, and a maze of lanes and alleys winding among them. Women and men paced deep in thought, conversed with one another beneath arched porticos, yelled over coffee mugs, or lay sleeping on the ground.

“One thing that is immediately apparent,” he said to Fix, “is that these reading-scholars have no dignity. Look at that fellow over there, he’s lying beneath a bench like any public drunk! All of them together don’t have the respectability of a single Recital Thane.”

“So you have doubled their respectability by merely entering,” Fix said.

“What’s a Recital Thane?” Munahim asked.

“Indrajit is the epic poet of his people,” Fix explained. “He can recite their epic from memory. A hundred thousand lines about fish-headed warriors.”

“Thirty thousand,” Indrajit said, “give or take.” He let the jibe about his resembling a fish pass.

“Perhaps some of these people might be interested in studying at your feet,” Fix suggested. His expression looked serious. “You’re looking for apprentices.”

Indrajit scanned the area. “I would prefer people of my own kind, if possible. And in any case, committing the art of the Blaatshi Epic to memory is a serious undertaking that requires real discipline, hard work, and self-sacrifice. No one I see here seems capable of any of that.”

“A few times a year, the Hall of Guesses puts on its formal robes,” Fix said, “when they award each other degrees, and for major cult processions. Then they look impressive. The rest of the time, they mostly care about what’s inside. Thoughts and ideas. That should appeal to you, no?”

“No thought is so noble that it matters a whit,” Indrajit said, “unless it is matched to noble deeds.”

The messenger stopped. They were somewhere in the center of the maze—within the larger warren of the Crown, and again within the still larger labyrinth of Kish—beside a small brick building. Next to the building’s open door hung a bronze sign stamped with letters, and in front of the sign stood a man.

He was shaped like a cone, with the narrow tip pointing up. The wide base of the cone sagged on all sides, and the gray toga hanging over everything nearly obscured tree trunk-like legs that terminated with nails but no apparent feet, like elephant’s legs. A whiskered tail swished quickly back and forth, agitating the lower folds of the toga. Long, muscular arms hung at his side, and his head was thick and boxy, with a prominent, bulging forehead and four yellowing tusks. His skin was pale white, callused, and speckled here and there with thick stands of black bristles.

Indrajit cocked his head to one side. “What race of man are you?”

It was not entirely a polite question.

“I’m an Olifar.” The man’s voice sounded like an iron sheet dragged over gravel. “Jat Bighra is my name. First Lecturer in Druvash Technologies. And you are Blaatshi. We see few of you in Kish.”

“Few, or none?”

“You’re the first I’ve seen, I admit.”

The messenger bowed and retreated.

“Why did you send for us?” Fix asked.

“I wouldn’t have sent for anyone.” Bighra shrugged. “We have our own men. But the lord chamberlain was here, meeting with the prime magister, and apparently he felt strongly that you might be able to help. He insisted. We are grateful for the help, of course.”

“And what are you paying?” Fix asked.

“The prime magister has authorized ten Imperials for the investigation, and fifty Imperials if you bring her back.”

“Show us the hole,” Indrajit said. “And tell us who the ‘she’ in question is. The messenger said a group of your scholars went down a hole in the basement and didn’t come back up.”

Munahim sniffed.

Bighra led them into the building. Through open doorways, Indrajit saw large rooms, each with a low stage at one end. The narrow halls connecting the rooms were decorated with drawings on the walls, but Indrajit couldn’t figure out any of the images. They seemed to be of objects, but the illustrations were cunningly conceived to reveal both the insides and the outsides of the objects at the same time. Universally, the insides were much more complicated, consisting of wires and tubes and nodes that resembled gemstones and plates. The outsides mostly looked like rounded stones or boxes.

“What is this place?” Indrajit asked. “What are these drawings?”

Jat Bighra led them down stairs. “Ironically, one of the subjects studied in this building is Druvash Technologies.”

“Of which you are First Lecturer,” Fix said.

Bighra nodded. “And Sari was Second Lecturer. Her work was promising, if a little radical.”

“I don’t care about her work in Druvash Sorceries,” Indrajit said. “Tell me about how she disappeared.”

Bighra nodded, leading them down a second flight of stairs. The light down here came from oil lamps, set into niches in the walls. Kish was an ancient city, with multiple levels of previous occupation hidden beneath its streets in the form of mazelike underground ruins. The Hall of Guesses, or at least this building, seemed to have been constructed by sinking several levels of basement down into those ruins. That meant that beyond the walls surrounding Indrajit now, there might be flowing sewers, rapeworm nests, and worse.

It also meant that the Hall of Guesses was bigger than it appeared, and potentially much bigger.

“I care,” Fix said. “What was the Second Lecturer studying?”

“Power,” Bighra said. “Power generation. She had a theory about what powers Druvash artifacts that had managed to garner a few influential adherents.”

“You don’t agree with her theory?” Fix suggested.

Munahim sniffed.

Bighra shrugged. “From my work in Druvash weaponry, I can’t see how her theory explains half of what it would need to explain, even to be taken seriously as a hypothesis. I encouraged her to continue to think boldly, but...no, I don’t think she was ever going to prove anything.”

“Druvash weaponry?” Indrajit asked. “I don’t suppose that’s available for purchase, say, to employees of the lord chamberlain?”

Bighra laughed. “Oh, heavens, no, it’s far too destructive. Also, we have precious few pieces, so they have to stay available to us for study.”

“Did Sari have an office in this building?” Munahim asked. “Or can you show me where her personal effects are?”

“Er...yes, hold on, we have to go back up one flight.” Jat Bighra turned and led them up stairs and down a hallway to a narrow rectangular room with a desk at one end.

“May I have a moment alone in here?” Munahim asked.

Bighra shrugged and Munahim shut the door.

“Frozen hells,” Indrajit said. “He’s defecating.”

“What?” Bighra blinked. “Why would he do that in Sari’s office?”

“So we can’t see him eat it,” Indrajit grumbled.

“First of all,” Fix said, “you don’t know that’s what he’s doing. This is just your grumpy side coming out. And second, if that is what he’s up to, then he’s having the decency not to do it in front of you.”

“Ah,” Jat Bighra said. “He’s a Kyone. I’ve read about their coprophagy.”

“I don’t know what the word means,” Indrajit said, “and I think I’d rather not find out.”

“Eating excrement is far from the most bizarre or repellent eating habit of the thousand races of man,” Jat Bighra said. “Anthropophagy and cannibalism, surely, must rate at the top. I’ve read of a race of man whose members eat their own flesh as a means of suicide, when they become too old, and a burden on their communities.”

“It isn’t a competition,” Indrajit said. “That’s all disgusting.”

“There are different hypotheses about why the Kyones do it.” Bighra scrabbed the thick, scabby skin of his jaw reflectively. “Some say it aids in digestion. Others think they do it when their diet is lacking some important nutrient.”

“This is what’s wrong with the Hall of Guesses,” Indrajit said. “You sit around thinking about things like this.”

“He said he gets caught up in the moment,” Fix said.

“Which sounds like compulsion or madness.” Bighra nodded. “But you see, that only raises more questions. Why would a race of man be constituted so as to feel compelled to eat feces? And why do some of them prefer their own, and some prefer the excrement of others?”

“Shut up right now,” Indrajit said, “or I’ll draw my sword and attack you both.”

The door opened and Munahim emerged, his face mournful.

“I’m not going to ask what you were doing in there,” Indrajit said, “and I’d prefer you not tell me.”

Munahim’s shoulders slumped, and he nodded.

“Right.” Jat Bighra cleared his throat. “Just back down one level, and we’re there.” He turned and walked, and they followed him. “It was renovations, you see. The Hall had a jobber crew in here, fixing some corroded heat ducts behind the walls, and they accidentally broke through the floor.”

He stopped in front of a door with a lock, and took a ring of keys from inside his toga. Indrajit guessed they must be in the corner of the floor, several levels down from the street...maybe five levels? If he exited the building horizontally, and could keep moving until he saw daylight, he’d come out in the Spill or the Lee or the Dregs.

Welcome to Kish; it’s as hollow as its people’s hearts.

“Beyond that door,” Indrajit said, “are we still in the building?”

Bighra shrugged. “I think you would say no, we will have left the building, and be underneath the city. But the pipes and ducts and crawlspaces that serve the building pass through that space, so I’m not so sure. Where does the building really end?”

Indrajit took the oil lamp from the nearest niche. He held it in his left hand and drew his sword. “I really meant, will I need a light?”

Jat Bighra opened the door. Beyond lay a packed dirt floor, crumbling brick columns and arches, and bronze ducts. Indrajit’s light proved to be unnecessary, because the space was lit. A few paces from the door, two brick arches came together, and where a column should have stood, there was only a crumbling orange stalactite, and beneath it, a hole in the floor. A splinter of green light came up through the hole; it wasn’t much, but it was enough to see by.

“You might get along fine without a light,” the First Lecturer said. “The workmen accidentally broke through the floor, with the result that you see.”

Indrajit held on to his lamp anyway.

“And Sari went down in there?” Fix said.

“Yes,” Bighra said.

Munahim sniffed.

“Something to do with her research?” Fix suggested.

Bighra shrugged. “I suppose. She got excited, and she took two of the most experienced students who were reading with her and went right in.”

“Not you?” Indrajit asked.

“I stayed up here,” Bighra said. “I had work to do.”

“What, this morning?” Fix asked.

“Yesterday,” Jat Bighra said. “We shut the door to keep anyone else from getting hurt, or wandering off into the maze, of course. But she never came back.”

“You didn’t post a guard or anything?” Indrajit asked.

Bighra shook his head. “This door is always here. It’s locked, and nothing has ever come through, other than our own people.”

Fix rubbed his chin. “So Sari hoped to find a Druvash power source.”

“Or perhaps she was finally ready to give up on that idea,” Bighra suggested, “and hoped to find something new to study. Or perhaps she was just curious. It takes a lot of natural curiosity to make someone a good lecturer at the Hall of Guesses. Just because something is glowing green down there, that doesn’t mean it’s Druvash.”

“It might not even be sorcery,” Indrajit said. “It could be some creature that glows in the dark.”

Bighra nodded.

“Why don’t you give us the key?” Fix suggested. “You can stay here. We’ll come back and report what we find.”

“I’ll come.” Bighra smiled nervously. “She was my colleague, and I’d like to know what happened. And I’ll have to make my report to the prime magister, so it’s best if I’m actually a witness.”

They all stepped into the crumbling brick maze and Jat Bighra locked the door behind them. Indrajit kept his sword in his hand. The air smelled sour, with a hint of charnel and ash, and it wasn’t moving at all.

Fix and Munahim went first. Bighra gestured politely to Indrajit to go next, and Indrajit shook his head. “You’re the client,” Indrajit said. “You go in the middle, and I’ll bring up the rear. In case anything tries to ambush us, you get the maximum protection.”

“I’m quite capable,” the Olifar grunted.

“Yes, you’re a Druvash sorcerer.” Indrajit pointed with the tip of Vacho. “You really look the part, in that toga. Now get moving, or else give me the keys and go back.”

The hole in the floor opened at the top of a scree-cluttered slope. The source of the light was not visible as Indrajit stooped to avoid banging his forehead, and entered. Ahead, along the slope below him, he saw Munahim close behind Fix. The Kyone walked bent over, as if bringing his nose close to the ground. Was he really able to track by scent? And, if so, was he following Sari and her two readers now?

Readers. Indrajit snorted.

A hundred cubits or more separated the two in the lead from Indrajit and the scholar. With his peripheral vision, Indrajit watched for exits on the left and right sides of the slope of rubble, and saw none. About halfway down the slope, a long black scorch mark blighted one wall. Because he saw better to the sides than immediately in front of him, when he needed to be extra careful about his footing, he turned his head slightly to one side.

“What do your Druvash weapons do, then?” he asked.

“Some of them, we don’t yet know.” Bighra stumbled, but caught himself. “Indeed, some of my papers have presented arguments that unidentified objects may, in fact, be weapons that we do not yet understand.”

Papers. Indrajit snorted.

“But surely you must know how some of them work,” Indrajit said. “Or you couldn’t be certain there were any Druvash weapons at all. Maybe someone would present the theory that the Druvash were entirely peaceful.”

“That theory has been argued,” Bighra said. “It was vigorously maintained by a Pelthite scholar named Umram Sog, about a century ago. But the blasted quality of Druvash ruins told against him; there’s simply no way that the Druvash succumbed to a disease, or economic depression, or existential malaise.”

“I don’t know,” Indrajit said. “Never underestimate the deadliness of existential malaise.”

“And once we finally started to be able to use some of the Druvash artifacts and learned that they were efficient killing machines, his theory imploded.”

“So you know how they work.”

“That’s not quite right. We can operate some of them. We’re a long way from knowing how they work.”

Indrajit nodded. Fix and Munahim had reached a flat space below the stones. Ahead of them stretched a featureless stone wall, through which were bored perfectly circular holes. The green light shone from the hole on the left-hand side.

Indrajit and Jat Bighra were nearing the bottom of the slope, too. The air here still felt stale and motionless, but the smell of ash was gone.

“And you say they don’t kill by inflicting existential malaise.”

“Some throw projectiles. Like Thûlian black powder weapons, only the projectile is packed in metal.”

Indrajit grunted. “No pouring in the fabled powder, eh?”

“No. Other weapons fire heat rays.”

“Heat rays?”

“Imagine a ray of the sun, but greatly intensified, so that it burned flesh to ash upon contact.”

Something tickled at the back of Indrajit’s consciousness.

“Have you ever seen the body of a Druvash?” he asked. “Or the skeleton, or the mummy, or whatever? Even an image, say a sculpture or an old mosaic?”

“No one has,” Bighra said. “The discovery of an intact Druvash body would be a world-shaking step forward in learning about them. Scattered bones have been recovered to date, but not enough even to be certain how big they were.”

“Is that because of the nature of their weapons?” Indrajit asked. “A ray of heat, if it was hot enough, might incinerate bone as well as flesh.”

I think some of the artifacts we haven’t yet figured out are explosives,” Jat Bighra said. “Others seem to be airborne poisons. One is said by a very old source to cause transformation of its targets, whatever that might mean. I’ve read an account of a mobile, controllable cloud of acid. Other weapons attack by sound.”

“Fearsome, indeed,” Indrajit said. “Do the lords of the great families know about all this? I would think they would be interested in controlling these weapons. Especially if it came to a war. If Ukeling pirates sailed up to the West Flats, I bet Orem Thrush would love to be able to sink their ships by hitting them with Druvash sunbeams.”

“The Lords of Kish are aware of my work.” There was pride in Bighra’s voice. “It may be that Orem Thrush was meeting with the prime magister this morning to be updated on my researches.”

“And this is how he heard about a missing second lecturer,” Indrajit said. “And this is why he cares.”

“I suppose.” Bighra sniffed. “It’s not every lecturer whose work is noticed by the powerful.”

“What’s the difference between being first lecturer and being second?” Indrajit asked. “Better pay?”

“People in my position can hardly be bothered about such things as pay,” Jat Bighra said. “We get paid enough, and there is a pension, and living quarters within the walls of the Hall. All the food I want, of the best kind. Girls, if we want them. I suppose the first lecturer in any department has more honor.”

Fix and Munahim were well along the length of the left-hand passage, appearing now as mere shadows. Indrajit and Bighra approached the tunnel mouth. Not only was the opening of the tunnel perfectly circular, but the passage beyond maintained the same shape all along its length, its walls completely smooth.

“Better job security?” Indrajit suggested.

“We’re all pretty secure, as long as the wealthy of Kish are willing to pay to send their useless children here to be educated.” Bighra laughed, a short, sharp bark. “And as long as we are patronized by the Lords of Kish.”

“But you get to go first in the parades, as First Lecturer,” Indrajit said. “Your name is read from the roll before anyone else’s. You stand foremost in the...I don’t know, the ceremonies. You get the better seating at the opera. You get prestige.”

“All of that, yes,” the First Lecturer said. “Prestige, yes.”

“Prestige is worth a lot to some people,” Indrajit suggested. “Many would envy you.”

“Well, hum-ho,” Bighra said.

“When would Sari have become first lecturer?” Indrajit asked. “Only if you died or retired, I guess?”

“Based on how her research was going, yes,” Bighra said. “She was chasing a dead end, though I don’t think she would ever admit it. I suppose if I had moved into administration, somehow, she might have become first. But I’m not the type.”

The First Lecturer was nearing the end of the tunnel. His step was becoming slower, more hesitant. The silhouettes of Munahim and Fix had disappeared from view. A bass hum rolled into Indrajit’s hearing and made his bones tremble.

“Did you go down this far?” Indrajit asked.

Bighra shook his head. “I stayed above, as I said.”

“Should we be calling for them?” Indrajit said. “I mean, we don’t want to attract the attention of anything nasty that lives down here, but, on the other hand, that’s why we’re armed. And Sari and her readers might be lying injured somewhere.”

He adjusted his grip on his sword and raised it, resting the blade on his shoulder.

“Sari!” Jat Bighra called. “Chumble! Tom Tom!”

The names echoed up and down the circular stone tunnel, and there was no response.

Bighra exited the tunnel at the far end and his body seemed to acquire a green halo, surrounding the scholar entirely, for just a moment. Indrajit moved slowly into the next chamber, casting his eyes around while still keeping his attention fixed on Bighra.

To the right, a stone wall was incised with deep grooves in complex patterns. Was that some kind of writing? Bronze spheres sat poised atop those grooves, which might be the handles on levers, which might then...ride within the grooves? Indrajit shook his head. At a quick glance, there were maybe a hundred of the balls, and enough groove-cut wall to make a decent Rûphat court, if it were laid horizontal.

To the left, a handrail marked the edge of the flat shelf on which they all stood. Behind the rail, the floor dropped away and the ceiling rose, and the walls on the far side were smooth, without railing, walkway, or grooves. In the center of the resulting space, a green fire burned. It was the size of a large bonfire, or a small, one-room hut. Indrajit blinked and his eyes watered, but he couldn’t tell whether the fire was contained within some kind of glass, or whether instead the fire was simply so glossy and iridescent that it gave the impression of being bottled. Indrajit could see no bottom of the fire, and no fuel. The green flame seemed simply to exist, floating in the air.

It gave off no heat.

Fix turned to face Indrajit and Bighra. “Sari came down here with her readers because she thought the green light might teach her something about Druvash power. It looks like she was probably right.”

“I suppose so,” Bighra said slowly. “Have you seen any sign of her?”

“One thing did strike me as strange,” Fix said. “Why would she come down here with just a couple of students? Why not some of your Hall of Guesses guardsmen, or a jobber company? Indrajit and I are tough, armed men, and we avoid coming down into the ruins whenever we can, because there are dangerous things down here. Why would a second lecturer rush down here with so little protection?”

“Oh, that’s obvious,” Indrajit said. “You just have to stop imagining that the scholars in the Hall of Guesses have some kind of magical selflessness. These aren’t the adepts of Salish-Bozar the White, Fix, these are ordinary, petty, ambitious men.”

“Hey,” Bighra objected.

“And how do men get power in this world?” Indrajit asked. “By controlling access to a resource. By controlling the contracts, in the case of the Lords of Kish. By controlling access to, what do you call it, in the case of the Paper Sook.”

“Capital,” Fix said.

“Capital. And by controlling access to knowledge, if you’re a lecturer in the Hall of Guesses. Sari wanted the information for herself and her best students, and no one else. She wanted to prove she was right, after all, or get new information for her theory, whatever it was. She wanted work for her students to control and carry out, and this was a golden opportunity to have that. Bringing along anyone who might steal the information, or accidentally pass it on to someone on the outside, jeopardized that opportunity. And look, it was so close. What did it take us to climb down here, a mere twenty minutes?”

“Too bad she got lost,” Jat Bighra said. “Wandered off and got eaten by some unknown beast.”

Indrajit nodded. “She made one mistake.”

“What do we do now?” Bighra said.

“Now,” Fix said, “we have to go tell the prime magister that his First Lecturer of Druvash Technologies committed three murders.”

Jat Bighra pulled something from inside his toga. It looked like a flat white disk, smooth and small enough to fit in the palm of his hand. One end was truncated and flat, and rimmed with black. He pointed it at Fix—

Munahim leaped, dragging Fix to the floor—

A white sheet of flame burst from the disk for a split second, melting a section of the railing ten cubits wide—

And then Indrajit brought his sword, Vacho, down in an overhand motion. He meant to strike with the flat of his blade, knocking the strange weapon from the scholar’s hand, but in the excitement of the moment, he struck with the blade instead. Vacho sliced through skin and bone and bit deep into the disk.

A blinding flash of light and a wall of force hurled Indrajit backward. He struck the stone wall headfirst, and for a time he lost track of his surroundings.

“Indrajit,” he heard. “Can you hear me?”

“I can hear you,” he said, his voice slurring. Blinking, he climbed to his feet with the help of the wall. Fix and Munahim helped him up—Fix’s eyebrows and the hair on the Kyone’s muzzle were singed nearly bare, but otherwise they seemed unharmed.

Jat Bighra, on the other hand, was dead. His nose was smashed flat and his eyes jellied, probably by the same blast that had hurled Indrajit off his feet. His windpipe was also smashed flat, which was likely what had killed him.

“You could have just knocked him down,” Fix said.

“I got caught up in the moment.” Indrajit shrugged. “Be grateful that you’re alive, after you called him out like that.”

Indrajit found Vacho lying on the floor and picked the sword up, returning it to his belt. The oil lamp lay shattered and he left it in its puddle of fuel.

“How did you figure it out?” Fix asked Indrajit.

“It seemed pretty clear that he wanted Sari to fail,” Indrajit said. “And there are flame marks on the wall back up there. And I couldn’t figure out why he was accompanying us down here, unless it was to make certain we failed, too. I think he followed Sari and her readers down here and burned them to ash with that flame weapon before she even saw this thing. Frozen hells, maybe she was on the path to overtaking him as first lecturer, and he had no other way to stop her. How about you?”

Munahim shrugged. “I could smell from the trail that Bighra had been down here before. He was lying to us.”

Indrajit almost shot back that the Kyone’s sense of smell had been redundant, that he, Indrajit, had divined Bighra’s guilt with no help. But he decided not to, and instead, he clapped the Kyone on the shoulder.

Munahim grinned, tongue lolling from his mouth.

“Do we tell the prime magister about this?” Fix pointed at the green flame.

“If we tell him,” Indrajit said, “he can block off the passages around it, and stop anyone else from getting to the flame and, I don’t know, causing an explosion. Lighting Kish on fire.”

“But if we tell him,” Fix said, “then his scholars will have access to this energy, which looks like it could be really dangerous.”

“Hard choices.” Munahim shook his head.

“On the plus side,” Indrajit said, “the two leading scholars studying Druvash sorcery are now both dead. That probably sets the field back twenty years.”

“Maybe more,” Fix said, “depending on how jealously they guarded their knowledge from each other. So maybe the Hall of Guesses will come down here and fence in this green flame, but there will be no one who can do anything with it. Not for years. Maybe decades.”

Indrajit sighed. “I guess that’s the solution, then. Why does it feel like, no matter how hard we try to do the right thing, the powers that be always remain the powers that be?”

“The powers that be are not necessarily evil,” Fix said.

“And the powers that be have cash to pay,” Munahim said.

“That,” Indrajit said, “is a really good point. And today, the powers that be owe us ten Imperials. I assume your math is good enough to know how many Imperials you get, Munahim?”

“One of five shares means that I get two,” the Kyone said.

“Yes,” Indrajit agreed. “As long as you don’t slip up and eat feces between here and the prime magister’s office.”

Munahim grinned, somehow still managing to look mournful in his eyes. “I’ll try.”


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Framed