Blood of the City

by Robin D. Laws

  Ontor let Luma lead as they penetrated the first, least glorious ring of tents and stalls. These formed the territory of the food vendors. Smells of grilling sardines, simmering fish stock, and soured skillet grease rose to meet them.

  Beyond these lay steadily grander, sturdier stalls, which in turn would taper off near the piers, where the pattern reversed and the selection grew dodgier once more. From the barmaid's sniffing description, the No-Horn Tavern would be found amid the bazaar's dicier precincts, either near or directly next to the docks.

  Along the way, Luma glimpsed a cloaked figure whom she thought might have been her mysterious watcher, the one that so often pricked at her senses. On a second look, however, she identified him as a person of lesser mystery: a priest of Desna, clad as a layman, furtively ducking into a backstreet whorehouse.

  Enveloped in clouds of steam from a stall selling crab soup stood one of Luma's odder contacts. The cargo-handler V'kka belonged to the reptilian race known as the lizardfolk. She held a soup bowl up to her snout, gurgling its contents into her gullet past a row of dagger-shaped teeth. Hot liquid, interspersed with flakes of crab meat, dribbled down the green scales of her arm. Her long tail whipped from side to side in pleasure, her head-spines quivering in a complementary rhythm.

  V'kka indicated her desire for seconds by slamming her bowl down on the soup stall's rail. The gray-faced vendor sighed, as if the lizard-woman's brusque manners were a matter of morning routine, and ladled her another serving. Luma announced her presence with a cough.

  The stevedore wheeled on her, then lapsed into a state of wary recognition. "Luma!" she hissed. She took note of Ontor. "You must be her brother, Arrus."

  "Her brother Ontor," he corrected.

  "Ah yes, he is the better-known one, isn't he?"

  Ontor faked a smile. "He is the eldest, yes."

  V'kka pointed to Luma. "This one aided me, when alchemists stole our egg-kin."

  "I worked that case as well," Ontor said.

  She subjected him to a blank, reptilian stare. "It is her I trust."

  "V'kka," said Luma, "we're looking for a—"

  "You are here to investigate the assassinations. The others won't listen to me, but you will agree that it has to be the Red Mantis."

  Since the apprehension of the alchemists, Luma had learned to depend on V'kka only for the simplest pieces of information. The lizard-woman collected wild tales of conspiracy as children gather shells on the seashore. The last time they had spoken, V'kka had convinced herself of an imminent invasion by the atheists of arid Rahadoum. Before then, she saw in every ill omen the frost-bitten hands of Irriseni witches. Whatever alarmed her now, it would not involve the dreaded assassin cult.

  "We pursue an unrelated matter," Luma said.

  "You can't catch the Red Mantis killers themselves," breathed V'kka, "They disguise themselves in stolen faces, and walk in summoned shadows. But those who hired them, those you can pursue. The question is, who benefits?"

  It would be easier to humor her than to change the subject. "From what?"

  "The deaths of our guild leaders. It can only be the shippers, who wish to break us, and bully down our fees."

  "How many have died?"

  "First Balold, and then, not two months later, his successor, Fustolt."

  "And were either felled by a sniper's arrow, or had their throats cut by a sawtoothed blade, so that they drowned in their own blood?" The latter was the infamous signature weapon of the Red Mantis cult throughout the world. Those of Magnimar showed an equal predilection for the perfectly aimed bow shot—if, that is, the terrified whispers about them held any truth.

  V'kka extended her head-fins. "Balold supposedly died of a bad oyster. That can only mean poisoning. Fustolt stood where a pile of crates fell, and was crushed. But who tipped them over?"

  "If the guild believes itself threatened, send them to Derexhi House. We will charge our usual fair fee, and get to the bottom of it."

  "Those fools attribute it all to coincidence!" V'kka snorted.

  "About our other matter. We're looking for a tavern called the No-Horn. Where might we find it?"

  V'kka's long, pink tongue thrust itself from between her teeth, then retreated back into the cavern of her mouth. "Your drinking spots are all the same to me. I do not frequent them."

  After an awkward farewell, Luma and Ontor went on their way, moving farther down the lane of food stalls.

  Ontor grimaced. "We're not going to have to stop and chat with every eccentric of the bazaar, are we?"

  "I thought she might know the place. People here have good reason not to talk to us. V'kka owes us, so I thought she might help."

  "More help like that, and we'll be here all day."

  Luma set off for the stall of a weathered crone. The woman shrank back. Luma held out a trio of coppers, the price of a barley pie.

  "Hello, Tlina," Luma said.

  The crone looked through her.

  Luma added a few more coppers.

  The vendor gritted her toothless gums and snatched them up. "Spicy or mild?" she demanded.

  "Mild." Luma pulled out a handkerchief to hold the hot pie, which the crone served up with a pair of crooked tongs.

  "I can't be seen talking to you no more," Tlina mumbled. "Princess says no more snitching. And to the city guard, no talking at'all."

  "The Derexhi aren't the city guard."

  "Next thing to it. I'm not running afoul of no Princess."

  The title of Princess was self-anointed, currently claimed by a woman named Sabriyya Kalmeram. Because Luma had no idea what this business with Khonderian was, she couldn't say for sure that it wouldn't involve the locally popular gang lord. But it was best to say that it wouldn't. Here, as elsewhere in the city, people made as much of their own law as they thought necessary. The family's dealings with Kalmeram's people had always been touchy.

  "Asking for directions isn't snitching, is it? We're looking for the No-Horn Tavern."

  "Tavern? There's a place called No-Horn's, but tavern's too flattering a term." She pointed a quavering arm over to the south.

  "And incidentally, are you acquainted with a gnome named Noole?"

  Tlina spat, her trajectory missing her own tray of merchandise by the slimmest of margins. "Happens that I'm not and wouldn't tell you if I was."

  Luma waved Ontor over; they followed Tlina's directions, dodging, in sequence, a stumbling beggar, a two-child team of apprentice cutpurses, and an extravagantly puking gutter-wretch. This last bazaar denizen suggested that they had reached the desired radius. Indeed, they soon caught sight of a leaning black structure constructed from discarded pieces of ship's hull. A tavern sign hung askew over its curtained archway. It depicted a unicorn chained and tormented by hopping devils. Each danced about holding a bottle of spirits. The largest of the devils held aloft the creature's severed horn.

  "Auspicious," said Ontor, parting the curtain.

  Shafts of sunlight, admitted by gaps between ill-fitting planks, jabbed into the drinking hole's gloomy interior. Stacked barrels butted against its sturdiest wall. A dirty rope, tied to wobbly wooden stanchions, performed the duties of a bar counter, separating kegs from patrons. Leaking wine and beer filled the room with the odor of evaporated alcohol. Drinkers huddled at uneven tables, holding tight to their flagons so they wouldn't slide off. They numbered a dozen, give or take. All were men, no two of them outfitted in the same manner. Whether sailor or longshoreman, vendor or carter, their clothes clung to them, damp and sweat-stained.

  Behind the rope, on a leather chair that leaked yellowed stuffing, hunched the barman. At first glance, Luma took him for some unidentifiable hybrid of man and hobgoblin. As she drew closer, and her elven vision adjusted to the darkness, she saw that he was fully human, but terribly disfigured. She studied him without appearing to stare. His ears had been lopped off, and his flesh deeply scourged. Mottled patches of skin marked the boundaries of a less-than-complete divine healing.

  Hi
s sniff resounded with suspicion. "Yeah?" Neither she nor Ontor were soiled enough to fit in here.

  Ontor tossed him a golden coin. It spun through the air; the barman fumbled to catch it.

  "A round for the house," he said. "Keep the rest."

  The drinkers responded with a grudging murmur. They stood, flagons in hand, and queued up to have them filled. Heaving himself to an upright position, the barman seized the first of the flagons and waddled to the nearest spigot.

  "When he said a round for the house," said a patchily bearded patron, "he meant your best stuff."

  "That I did," Ontor said.

  Grumbling, the taverner reached for a higher spigot. "So what do you want of us, then?"

  One man, Luma noted, had refrained from joining the line. He'd positioned himself at the smallest of the bar's tables, wedged into a corner. She angled herself to better take his measure. Wide shoulders and a barrel chest gave way to a disproportionately narrow hips and a pair of spindly legs. Sooty robes, worn loosely, exposed gaunt pectorals. Dark tattoos writhed across his olive skin, giving him a mottled appearance. They encircled and overran patches of shiny flesh—burn scars. An uninitiated viewer might take the tattoos for mere decorative designs. Luma recognized them as letters written in arcane script.

  Something in the man's stillness tweaked her caution. It was unnatural to him, she intuited—a dam about to burst. As Ontor interviewed the barman, Luma stepped away. She thrust her hand into a pouch at her waist, feeling the milled edges of a glass prism. She called on the citysong, drawing it through the object. It chorused in her mind's ear: pages turning at the library, the drone of lecturing voices at the school of the arcane, the key turning in the lock of the museum's forbidden collection, the hollering of raggedy charlatans down in Dockway. The tattoos on the man's face, chest, and arms shimmered into intelligibility. His ink marks rendered into written form the primordial speech of an elemental plane. The man wore the language of fire.

  Luma shifted awareness, back to the exchange between Ontor and the barman.

  "You're Derexhi, ain't you?" the barman said.

  Ontor kept his smile pleasant. "He's owed money; we're to make arrangements for payment."

  To the impatience of the next man in line, the barman stopped pouring. "Not just Derexhi. The Derexhi."

  Ontor doffed his cap. "It's on behalf of a friend of his. Our client has come unexpectedly into money and wishes to discharge his many debts."

  The barman snorted. "The question ain't if we give a fig about Noole. The question is, if we help you run him down, what's our cut?"

  "Another gold piece," Ontor said.

  "He gets around, that Noole does. For all the locations he might be, a gold sail barely covers it."

  The man with the fire magic tattoos started muttering.

  "If you can't narrow it down, that argues not for a hefty payment, but against it," Ontor said.

  "Try down at the Triodea," suggested the sailor.

  "Don't just out and tell 'im!" the barman cried.

  The tattooed man finally spoke out loud. "Don't say anything."

  "Or Grand Arch," pitched in a snaggletoothed drinker. "He's taken a squat there."

  "Idiots!" said the barman.

  "If he's handing out coins, I want mine," snaggletooth retorted.

  The tattooed man stood, upending his table. "Noole is our friend!"

  The barman addressed him with the exasperation of a governess saddled with an unmanageable child. "Calm yourself, Hendregan."

  Hendregan giggled. Then, as quickly as it had vanished, his anger returned. "You're betrayers."

  Luma saw that he rubbed a ball of putty-like material between thumb and forefinger. She cried out Ontor's name and leapt across the room, knocking him onto its hard dirt floor.

  With a practiced overhand throw, Hendregan threw a tiny projectile of burning light. It landed on the barman and blossomed out into a ball of orange-red flame. With a whoosh, it met the alcohol hanging in the air and sitting in half-opened casks.

  The walls blew apart. The roof caved in and dropped on the drinking hole's inhabitants. As they fell, planks caught fire, or were incinerated instantly.

  The blast of heat pulled the air from Luma's lungs. She lay across her brother's back, less than a foot from the fireball's dissipating edge. Her cloak caught fire; she rolled and put it out. Ontor gasped beneath her.

  They rose, staggering out of the wreckage and taking in the blast's aftermath. A black cloud bubbled from the former site of No-Horn's. Blazing barrels disgorged beer and wine. Their contents washed over the barman's blackened corpse. Others of his clientele lay motionless around him, charred flesh falling from exposed bone.

  Hendregan stood unharmed in the wreckage. Flame licked at the sleeve of his robe. He scooped at the fire, flicking his wrist, sculpting it into the shape of a dragon, which then dissipated. The sound of a belly-laugh boomed from his unmoving lips. He spotted Luma and Ontor and advanced on them.

  Ontor reached for his throwing knives. Luma pulled him down. A second blast of flame—this one straighter, more keenly directed—roared through the air above them.

  "Let's go," Luma said.

  Ontor showed his agreement with a running crouch toward a refuse heap. Luma forked her path away from Ontor's, so they'd be two targets instead of one.

  Hendregan stomped at them, intoning an incantation. As he prepared to loose another blazing orb, Ontor popped up to hurl a knife at him. The wizard—or sorcerer, or whatever he was—ducked back, his spell-speech interrupted. Flame fizzled and popped around him.

  Wind carried ashes from the ruined bar onto nearby tents and the awnings of freestanding shops. Proprietors spilled from them. When they saw Hendregan, confusion turned to rage. They scrabbled for rocks and chunks of debris. Hendregan ignored their first peltings, stalking toward the garbage heap where Ontor had found cover. As the rain of stones intensified, he whirled on his tormentors.

  Luma peered out from behind a bale of nautical rope taller than she was. Hendegran had rashly opened himself to this comeuppance. Spell-hurlers needed others to cover them so they could perform their precise gesticulations undisturbed. With no one to shield him from the mob's improvised missiles, Hendregan had no choice but to flee. Once he turned to run, the bystanders showed little appetite for the chase.

  Ontor rejoined his half-sister. "Do we want to chase him?"

  "Do you want to chase him?"

  In unison, they shook their heads. Luma picked her way across still-smoldering floorboards, between the prone victims. She found the man who'd mentioned Grand Arch. Though badly burned, he had survived the attack. Luma knelt beside him. "If you can tell me more of Noole's place, I'll heal you."

  The drinker moaned his assent. "He mentioned a statue ..."

  He shrank back as Luma placed her hand on his shoulder. She called on the city's spirit of renewal. Magnimar sang to her of buildings rebuilt, of streets resurfaced. The song stole into the temples of the gods and collected fragments of their healing powers, as a wind picks up leaves of dust and whirls them down a laneway.

  Black sheets of crackled skin absorbed themselves into the man's flesh. It burned in reverse: blood slipped back into veins and wounds closed up. Were Luma a healer-priest, she might muster the power to grant him full recovery. Instead, the weaker healing magic of a citywalker would have to suffice. He would live, and had been accelerated instantly through the worst months of physical torment.

  A commotion grew from the lane to the west.

  "Hasten this," Ontor said.

  "I need a street name," Luma told her patient.

  The man marveled at his restored hands. "Not sure...Wheatman's Lane, or Barley Way ...it had the name of a grain in it."

  "Describe his squat."

  "He said it had a fine statue outside, one the owners could not know the value of, or they'd have sold it. A horse of pink marble, rearing up."

  Luma stood, following Ontor's gaze to an approaching assembly
of baton-wielding toughs. The princess's men.

  It was time to get scarce.

  Chapter Seven

  Grand Arch

  Together Luma and Ontor returned to the Summit. Once there, they headed south to Grand Arch, a district abutting the city's southern wall. In this district clustered the homes of international traders, many of whom dwelt in Magnimar only during the warm months. The trading season had not yet reached its peak. Early arrivers might be reopening their houses now, but it would be a month or so before the area returned fully to life. The habit of leaving lush manses unoccupied for long stretches gave license to squatters. Pennywise traders who refused to foot the bill for year-round guardians sometimes came back from travels elsewhere to find locks broken and larders raided. Those more cautious than thrifty hired sentinels from the Derexhi or their competitors.

  Luma reviewed her mental map of the city for streets that took their names from grains, or might be misremembered as such, and that stood largely abandoned in the off-season. She came up with six and ranked them from closest to farthest. If she and Ontor were lucky, they'd find Noole at Wheatman's Lane, just as the burned man had said.

  To Luma this part of town posed a nagging paradox. It was made up of foreign bits and pieces which together one might regard as an imposition on Magnimar's character. Here, structures of various styles jostled promiscuously up against one another, proclaiming not the unity of the monument city, but the variety of builders' homelands. Through roofing styles the traders blazoned their affiliations. On one street alone, the roofs recalled the pagodas of Jalmeray, the tropical counting houses of the Shackles, and the high spires of legend-ridden Absalom. Yet if each structure sang of its own distant origin, their discordant harmony joined to form a distinctive whole unique to Luma's city.

  As a hedge against robbery that had proven more hopeful than practical, the streets here went unmarked. Luma, who could recite the name of every laneway, alley, and crescent in any order specified, had no trouble finding the ones they sought.