The Complete Ivory

by Doris Egan

  Well, I knew for sure that he wasn't home. That didn't necessarily mean the hut was empty, of course. A route had been cleared through the junk and garbage down to the hut, and I followed it past an old solo wagonseat, a set of broken tah-tables, three benches, and part of a bed.

  There was a tiny window near the door, shuttered over. I pulled the door handle, then pushed, then gave as good a kick as I could. It opened.

  The hut was empty. I stepped inside and found myself in a one-room home with cluttered shelves, a stove in the middle of the door with an iron railing around it, a tiny old-fashioned desk stuffed with papers (out of place in its baroque elegance), and a small wooden counter with covered jars of foodstuffs. Some unidentiable piece of meat hung by a string from the ceiling; it was just beginning to go bad. A sort of hammock arrangement had been egged in one corner with a sleeping pallet and a pulley.

  All just waiting for Moros to return. One would think that if anyone else lived here, they would have taken down the meat by now. I pulled off my outer robe and pitched it onto the sleeping pallet. This would be a potentially boring task, but not dangerous, I decided; and I went through the food jars first.

  No, I had no idea what I was looking for. I was following the "ask questions, gather data; and maybe something will turn up" school of investigative thought. Food jars were my first choice because they seemed logically least likely to contain anything of interest; this being Ivory, I assumed secrets were more likely to be there than anywhere else.

  Moros had sugar, rice, and dried fruit. Not a man on a high budget. I opened the stove door; it was empty. I poked around beneath it for a while, then started inspecting Moros's endless collection of bottles, labeled neatly on his crowded shelves. Herbs and oddities, bits of this and that—a recipe book for sorcery, but nothing that meant anything to me.

  I stripped the bedding and looked under the mat. I knocked on floors and walls. I pulled down the oil lamp from its ceiling hook.

  Which left the desk. At least the padded stool in front of it would give me a place to sit.

  We would start clockwise, I decided. I began opening the folded papers stuffed on the far top right.

  A bill for a new robe, recent and unpaid.

  A torn employment notice for a sorcerer willing to travel to the provinces.

  Sorcery notes, apparently unrelated to drowning.

  Interesting: A series of hand sketches of the river and the junkyard outside. A family of rats sat atop the old wagon seat, looking bright-eyed and very funny. Moros was in the wrong line of work.

  Had been in the wrong line of work, anyway.

  A letter. Aha, I thought, now we get to the good stuff!

  Dearest Gernie,

  Of course I haven't forgotten you. This just isn't the right proper most convenient time for you to join me. Things are all up in the air here; it wouldn't surprise me if there was fighting in the streets before long.

  It would have surprised me. So far the summer had been pretty dull in the way of Imperial goings-on.

  So stay where you are, I implore you. Meanwhile, please accept this little help of 25 12 10 tabals. I hope it will ease things for your mother and sister.

  Give my best wishes to everyone. Truthfully, my client list isn't growing quite as quickly as I'd hoped, but I'm doing very well…

  I put down the letter. Gernie, whoever he or she was, would wonder when there was no more correspondence.

  Maybe Gernie would come to the capital to see what was the matter.

  For Moros' sake, I hoped they never tracked him as far as this place and saw how he'd been living.

  Come on, Theodora, you're getting involved again. You'll never get through all these papers if you stop and speculate on every one.

  —A review of the chakon theater-dance season, torn from the Capital News.

  —Three letters from Gernie, folded and unfolded so they were brittle with usage; Gernie's sex was still unclear but his/her passion was not. Gernie kept pleading to come to the capital to be with Moros. Some of the letters were explicit; as a strait-laced Athenan I was a bit shocked, but I must say, fascinated—

  Still, it was getting late in the afternoon. I returned the packet to its cubbyhole. A carved wooden box sat atop a pile of papers; I opened the box and turned it over.

  A mass of ticket stubs from fortune halls in the gambling district. Points for just about any kind of game I'd ever heard of and many I hadn't. Moros, like so many others, hadn't been immune to dice fever, but at least he'd accumulated a stash of tickets to be cashed in at the appropriate halls later. Of course, there was no way of telling how much of his own money he'd had to lay out to win all these. I flicked through them idly: Cloud Hill, Wheel of Illusion, Patens of Bright Gold. The man must have worked his way through every establishment on Red Tah Street. I turned over the crimson ticket from the Red Umbrella Tith Parlor:

  "IOU 85 tab. L. Broca."

  I froze.

  I turned over another. "IOU 32 tab. L. Broca."

  I started to flick them all over. Most were blank, but about half the ones from the Umbrella and the Silver Shoe had Loden's signature below an amount.

  The idiot! Giving a signature to someone you were linked with in a criminal act—

  That was an Ivoran reaction. My next one, which was Athenan, went: Wait a minute, what evidence do we actually have here? So Loden owed Moros money. Loden owed everybody money, apparently. What light could this shed on Moros's assignment on Catmeral Bridge?

  Well, as long as Kade was around, Loden's money was pretty much spoken for. Moros really didn't have a prayer of seeing any of these IOUs cashed. Probably Loden had pointed that out in self-defense.

  Would they really get together to murder Kade just to get Loden out from under? But they couldn't be sure someone else wouldn't pick up Kade's account book, as in fact someone had. Still, Stereth Tar'krim made the tossing of monkey wrenches a way of life. And given Coalis' monkish background, the odds would have seemed pretty good that once Kade was gone, the debt would vanish too.

  I sat on the stool, clutching a handful of tickets, thinking.

  Another possibility: Loden out-and-out hired Moros to kill Kade, and the IOUs were not gambling losses at all, but a plausible means of contracting to pay him after the deed.

  The world was full of options, wasn't it?

  But how did this get Moros dead, with his throat cut, that day in the market? And who were the thugs who tried to get Ran and me? And Loden was just, well, such an idiot… . Even a screwed-up sort of murder seemed beyond him, frankly.

  I wished that damned dog would stop barking back at the shack down the path; I could hear him from here. I emptied the next cubbyhole of papers irritably. The prolific Gernie, with more to say on the same subject: More sketches. A hand-drawn map of the city; nicely done, I thought. I scooped up the gambling tickets and emptied them into my belt pouch, replaced the latest set of papers, and pulled out another.

  That psychotic dog! Finally he seemed to be calming down. His impulse to murder was transitory, probably whoever was walking by the shack had passed out of canine sight.

  I got up suddenly and went to peer out the small, dirty window. Two figures were silhouetted at the top of the bank.

  Loden Broca and Trey Lesseret. There was no reason they should show up here and now, with all the hours and days since the murder to pick from. Oh, the unfairness of the gods! This went beyond coincidence, this was the malign nature of the universe revealed. I looked around the room as though expecting a solution to present itself, like a clown jumping out of a closet in a slapstick farce; but physical law remained physical law. One room. One exit. No place to conceal anything as large as a human being.

  Behind the stove—too small. Behind the desk—too small. The counter. Wait—the bed? I heaved on Moros's pulley arrangement and lowered the pallet. Then I tossed my outerrobe up there again, put one foot on the railing around the stove, and rolled myself up after it. Would I be able to pull the bed up h
igher from this position? —Yes. With difficulty. I strained on the ropes until the pallet was so close to the ceiling I was practically plastered against it, then lay there in a sweaty, clinging tangle of robes. For a second I flashed back to that moment in Trade Square when I'd looked over at the knife. Probably Loden and Trey wouldn't need to bother with knives; Trey would still have his Mercian-issue pistol. I didn't feel concealed at all. You could probably market the hormone smell I was putting out then and sell it to sadists.

  They took forever to get to the hut. It was several centuries before the door opened.

  "Kanz," said Trey's voice. "Look what I stepped in."

  Loden laughed.

  "You think it's funny now," said Trey, "but I'll track it all over the floor, and you'll have to smell it."

  "We're not going to be here that long," said Loden.

  Footsteps on the wooden boards. Trey said, "Where should we start?" Without waiting for an answer, he went on, "You take the desk and I'll take the canisters."

  The sound of jars being opened, lids tossed on the counter. Papers at the desk being thrown to the floor. Then what I assumed were the shelves of bottles being checked. Trey must have finished first and joined Loden at the desk, because I could hear both of them going through the papers.

  "I don't think they're here," said Trey.

  "They have to be here."

  More papers scrunched and tossed. The sound of boots partially muffled by discarded letters on the floor.

  "I don't think they're here," said Trey again, in the sort of voice a father uses to say: Your birthday present didn't arrive on time; be a man about it.

  "He didn't live anywhere else, this is where he lived!

  They've got to be here somewhere, we just haven't looked hard enough."

  "Could someone else have gotten here ahead of us?"

  "Who?"

  "I don't know. Your Cormallons, maybe. You said they'd been told the address."

  "Cormallon's not working for Lord Porath anymore. And anyway—there wasn't time. Nobody even knew where Moros lived till yesterday. He kept a closed hatch, that one—didn't matter how drunk he was, never a word of personal information."

  "You should've tried harder to find out. Your little girl was right, Loden, you can't just leave stuff with your name on it lying around."

  "Don't lecture me. If I wanted to be lectured, I'd still be living at home. And what could I have done about it, anyway? Nobody knew where he lived!"

  "Somebody knew."

  "Nobody in the halls of fortune. Minister Tar'krim tracked down a whore he brought out here once, otherwise nobody would still know."

  "Huh," said Trey, in a cynical tone of voice. "If nobody's investigating, how come Stereth Tar'krim bothered to track down the whore?"

  Silence. Finally Loden said, "I'm not responsible for—"

  "I know. You're not responsible for anything.'"

  "That's not fair! Nobody understands what I've been going through. Especially the last few days. The agency throws me out, I have to live in a kanz mail chute, for the love of—and what about the Courts of Heaven, huh? Two high-tones try to kill me with a hotpencil during a tithball duel! I practically died of shock on the spot. Nobody warned me that was going to happen!"

  "Made your reaction all the more believable, didn't it?" said Trey, with cold humor.

  "I don't need that kind of help," said Loden firmly. A second later he added, "Though the barbarian feather did seem more sympathetic, afterward."

  Feather is not a term you hear much in the circles Ran moves in. It means female—in usage, generally a female of childbearing years. I'm not going to tell you the derivation. If you're ever on Ivory, don't use it.

  "There you are," said Trey. "Be glad you've got Velvet-Eyes and me to look after you." He was crumpling papers as he spoke. "Kanz! They're not in the desk, Loden, face it."

  "So what do we do?"

  "Hope you're right. Hope they're here someplace. Because if they are, they'll go up when we set fire to the hut."

  What?

  Trey said, "Get the cans. I set them down outside."

  Wait a damned minute here—

  Loden's boots went out, returned, and there was a sound of something heavy and metal being set on the floor. Somebody unstoppered a can, maybe Trey, for he began gossiping as he worked. "So tell me," splash, "did you spend all your time in the mail chute?" Splash. "Or is it true what they say about barbarian women?" Splash, splat. "Ugly to look at, but wild animals on the mattress?" A chemical smell filled the room.

  "I don't kiss and tell," said Loden.

  "The hell you don't." A can was set back on the floor, now with an empty, hollow ring. "Your pants have seen more activity than an Imperial legion in the field."

  Loden chuckled. Trey said thoughtfully, "Speaking of mattresses—"

  "What?"

  "That one up by the ceiling."

  I froze, completely, as though that would somehow take the idea out of Trey's mind.

  "What of it?" asked Loden.

  "Well, we haven't looked there. Maybe Moros liked to take out his tickets in bed and gloat over 'em."

  "Who cares? We're going to burn the whole place down, anyway."

  "Loden. My boy. We want to know we burnt them, don't we? We don't want to worry about them for the rest of our lives?"

  "Nobody cares about Kade anymore. By next spring they'll have forgotten he ever existed."

  "Loden, people hang themselves on loose ends. Take the pulley."

  With a rusty, squealing sound, the bed began to lower. I turned onto my right side and elbow and brought my left knee up. I got lower; the shelves of bottles came into view. I took my left foot off the mattress and brought my leg back. They would both be standing next to the pulley, on my left. I pivoted in the bed, hoping that the swinging my movement caused would be seen as a natural consequence of hauling the thing down.

  I'd been taught a few tricks once by a dirty fighter, an ex-member of the Imperial Guard. I hadn't practiced them in a long time, not having any heavily padded partners on hand to try to maim and kill—the circumstances under which I'd been taught had been unusual. But when your options dwindle down to a precious few…

  Surprise, I could hear my old instructor say. Surprise is your friend. Most fights are over in three seconds, if you're going to win them at all. And she'd had us count the seconds to prove that it was true.

  Trey and Loden were trained guardsmen with weapons. They knew what to do better than I did. But they weren't expecting Loden's barbarian feather on the pallet, and they wouldn't expect her to do much beyond cower. Time was on my side; it was the only blessed thing that was.

  A hand on a rope was visible. In a second, there would be a head—

  Trey's head. I kicked out my left foot with all my might, imagining there was a melon behind Trey's skull that I needed to burst. I could feel the heel of my sandal penetrate the softness of his face. He stumbled backward, without even time to look shocked.

  But the swinging bed hadn't provided enough purchase. I jumped off it, ran up to Trey, as close against him as though we were lovers, pulled down the bloody face he was grasping between his two hands, and smashed his forehead against my knee.

  He sank to the floor. I kicked his head one more time, being cautious. Probably about two seconds had passed. Loden was standing near the pulley, having taken a couple of steps back, looking horrified and at a loss. There was no belt holster; he wasn't armed, at least not with a pistol— maybe he'd had to turn it in when the Mercians put him on probation.

  I looked down at Trey, ready to grab his pistol and point it at Loden. No holster here, either? What was wrong with the world when security guards went around unarmed? Didn't they let them out with the ordnance when they were off-duty?

  Kanz. This left hand-to-hand, and the element of surprise was draining rapidly from the situation. I might be able to beat Loden on an IQ test, but he was a good twelve centimeters taller than I was, not to mention s
tronger and in better condition. Did I leave out better trained?

  Quickly, Theodora. Do it now, before he has time to assess the situation. He's still of balance. I launched myself at him.

  He backed away, arms out, not letting me close with him. "Theo," he-said, "wait a minute."

  Don't let them start a conversation, I could hear my instructor say. Nothing they say is of any interest to you.

  He moved farther away, behind the stove. "Relax, dammit, will you? Look, I'm unarmed."

  By now he should be willing enough to fight; he'd had time to get himself together and realize he could beat me to a pulp. The fact that he wasn't doing it lent him some credibility.

  I was starting to shake. Oh, kanz, if I'd missiled right into him, I could've finished before the aftershock hit.

  His gaze went to Trey on the floor. "Theo," he said, "we're here for good reason." He locked eyes with me and wiped sweat from his brow. "Could you just, please, give me a minute to tell you about it?"

  "What? What is it?" My voice came out on the thin edge of endurance.

  He was being awfully polite to somebody who wasn't a threat. Maybe he had a problem psychologically with doing the killing himself. Morally slippery, Loden. The responsibility drops onto the person who arranges it, not just the person who carries it out. Not a boy who thinks things through, are you?

  "Well?" I said again.

  "I was going to talk to you about this tonight… you have to believe me." He pulled a silk kerchief from a pocket and wiped his neck. I could smell his cheap perfume from here, even over the chemical scent from the spilled cans; a musky, repellent thing that reminded me of nothing so much as wet dog. The parcel receipt had reeked of it when we'd opened it up. The two smells twined together nauseously.

  The possibility existed that I might faint. I put one hand on the edge of the stove and let as much weight onto that as I could without seeming obvious. "So talk."