by Lara Adrian
Or she could get Arielle to help her break into Temesis’s penthouse. The pinhole he’d opened to transmit images of her father—and of the wizard’s own smug face—would linger. Arielle could probably widen it to let Munira slip through, then maybe throw a few grenades around, spray machine-gun fire, release some gremlins with grenades and machine guns—anything to create a distraction and rescue her father.
Not that they had gremlins, or grenades, or even a gun at the office. Hell, with her mug broken, she couldn’t even have thrown hot coffee on him.
The next option was the easiest: She could sit at her desk, open a magazine, and while the hours away waiting for a real job. Hadn’t she promised herself, when she’d finally left what she’d laughably called “home,” that she would never risk her neck getting her father out of trouble again?
But that was the problem. His life wasn’t in trouble because of yet another bet he couldn’t cover or because he’d been caught stealing from the wrong people. He was in trouble because of her. And however inconstant, untrustworthy, and undisciplined he was, he still loved her … in his way.
That left only one option: steal the Light of Ta’lab from Soledad’s sewer-palace within twenty-three hours and fifty-three minutes and bring it to Temesis’s doorstep so she could collect her payment.
Then she’d teach that arrogant wizard what happens to people who take from thieves.
Her first step was to call Arielle; only an idiot would try to do this job alone. While the phone rang, Munira tried to imagine what she could offer her partner in exchange for her help. Even full ownership of the company might not be enough.
Not that it mattered. Arielle didn’t answer her phone, and neither did her new boyfriend. Munira wasted another twenty minutes leaving messages with her partner’s friends. It looked like she was an idiot after all.
And there could be no holding back on this one. She was going to have to go all-in.
She opened the safe, took out three items, and slammed it shut. Within ten minutes, she was back out on the street and sprinting for home.
Her first stop was her dining room. She took a vihuela down from the wall. It had belonged to a musician she’d become friends with. She had found his daughter in an orphanage, and he had given her this guitar. It was the very one he’d played for the victims of a terrible mudslide in Acalana, and the recording of that impromptu performance had made him a star. Even now, years later, she wept when she played that concert; it was the only precious thing she owned.
Moving to her home phone, she draped the first of the items from her floor safe—a veil that made the wearer irresistible—over the phone receiver and conference-called three people who’d tried to buy the guitar from her in the past. The sudden auction landed her seventy-five thousand U.S. dollars, and she rushed to complete the sale before she had second thoughts. Forty-five minutes later, she was standing on the doorstep of a former Paraguayan paper magnate, trading the vihuela for a suitcase full of cash.
Her cab was waiting for her as requested. Time was rushing by, but there were some things she could not skip. Her actual trip Below should take less than an hour, maybe two if things went badly. Any longer and she would almost certainly never come back.
Which was why this whole setup was so frustrating. Despite what she’d said to Temesis, she thought maybe, just maybe, she could have pulled a job Below. It would have taken major preparation, maybe a year or a year and a half of planning and gathering resources. She could have raised some cash by stealing and fencing a few special items in private collections she’d had her eye on. She also knew people who needed favors and would repay them in kind: a family of Chinese sorcerers down in Mexico City, a squad of golems who hired themselves out as mercenaries, an intelligent plant in Oregon that could secrete an amazing variety of poisons and hallucinogens.
With enough money and the right favors, artifacts, and allies, Munira thought she could do anything. Hell, she could probably bring down the entire Baja Emirate. But twenty-four hours? The very idea was stupid and wasteful, and now her friend’s guitar was gone.
She cried then, a little. Not for her own life, which she had risked many times—hell, she enjoyed the danger, within reason. She cried for the empty space on her dining room wall.
The cabdriver did not notice, or didn’t mention it if she did. Typical human.
Munira had her game face on when she reached the Pescado District. No pescado was sold here anymore, but who wanted to live in the Condo District? The cab dropped her off outside the office of a waterfront tour company. Munira strolled to the alley, walked around a dumpster, and went down a flight of stairs to an old steel door.
The sign above the button read ELEVATOR REPAIR. There was no elevator. Munira took the second of the items she had “borrowed” from the floor safe and hung it around her neck. Whatever happened in the next hour, she and her clothes would stay clean. Then she rang twice in quick succession, then twice more.
A minute later, an old Hispanic woman opened the door. She was skeletal and sun-wrinkled, with dark spots on her forehead. “Munira,” she said.
“Good morning. This new look doesn’t suit you, um …”
“Alvara.” She stepped aside to let Munira into the apartment. Alvara glanced warily up the stairs, then shut the door.
As usual, the apartment was dim and stank like a garbage pit. “I don’t much like this look, either, but I have to take what I can get. At least I get to be a woman again.”
Munira didn’t know Alvara’s real name. She was a ghouleh, an eater of the dead, and the pensioners in the apartment building above kept her fed. The fact that she took on the form of those she ate, allowing her to sell their things and collect their checks, didn’t hurt, either.
“I need a map of the emir’s beachfront condo,” Munira said.
“It’ll cost you.”
“That’s why I brought this.” From her jacket pocket, Munira took out the last of the items she’d taken from her office safe. It was a book of dreaming, magically enchanted to hold the reader in a trance. Alvara snatched it from her hands with a speed and strength that would have surprised someone who didn’t know what she really was. She carried it to her desk and opened it. Then she became very still.
Munira waited a moment to make sure it took. This was a risky ploy; she’d used the book on the ghouleh two years before to acquire a map she couldn’t afford, and people who reused the same tricks eventually tipped their hand and wound up dead in an alley somewhere. Still, if the ghouleh had a map of El Sótano, she’d be unlikely to part with it. Even a suitcase full of money wasn’t worth the risk of landing on Soledad’s enemies list.
Munira counted to three hundred; Alvara didn’t move. Good. She pulled on a pair of latex gloves while she surveyed the apartment. It was a horror, of course; ghouls weren’t known for their hygiene. She ignored the flat file where the ghouleh kept her “regular” merchandise—the blueprints of houses, banks, museums, and office buildings that she sold to regular criminals. Instead Munira pushed through the curtain into the next room.
She’d ventured back here the last time she’d used the book, and this time it wasn’t as awful. There were no bloody, decomposing bodies, no stinking tubs, no piles of bones.
She approached the aging steel refrigerator against the far wall, lifted it, and set it gently and quietly in the middle of the floor.
There, set into the wall, was the safe. It was an American Security fire/burglary model, about two feet high and wide. Not the most extravagant security, but respectable. Munira bent to the dial, praying the ghouleh hadn’t changed the combination. She hadn’t.
The door swung open, revealing a rack of file folders. There was no jewelry, gold, or cash. Information was the ghouleh’s only wealth.
Munira found the folder she needed under S. Below was documented in a dozen pages of intersecting, overlapping maps. “Of course,” Munira muttered. “Because why should anything be easy?”
“I agree comp
letely.”
Munira spun around. Alvara tossed the book of dreaming into the garbage-filled corner behind her and leaned against the filthy refrigerator. “Damn,” Munira said.
Alvara came at her with blinding speed. Munira managed to catch the ghouleh’s clawed hands at the wrists, but the impact slammed her against the wall.
Munira held Alvara at arm’s length. The ghouleh was strong, but not as strong as the half-blood daughter of an ifrit. Still, Alvara was damn fast, and no tidiness charm could protect Munira from the diseases in the ghouleh’s pointed fingernails.
Alvara’s face began to lengthen like a jackal’s, and the whole front row of her upper teeth grew long, sharp, and hollow. A snake’s fangs injected venom, but the ghouleh would inject something far, far worse.
Munira’s adrenaline raced and the room suddenly seemed arctic. Alvara winced. Munira’s grip had become scorching hot. The flame was close to escaping from her—right next to all those precious maps—and Munira didn’t think she could hold it back for long. Unless …
Alvara opened her jaws wide and lunged forward, hissing. Munira spat into her open mouth.
The ghouleh threw herself backward, choking and clutching her scalded mouth. Munira shoved her to the ground, then lifted the steel refrigerator over her head, about to pound Alvara into a paste with it.
“No! Wait!” the ghouleh gasped, her natural whining voice revealing itself. “Don’t kill me! Take what you want. Please!”
Munira hesitated, then set the fridge down. She didn’t really want to kill Alvara if she didn’t have to. “You knew?”
Alvara crouched in the filth, face petulant. “I figured it out that day. You didn’t put the fridge back in place correctly. That’s how I knew you stole from me.”
“I didn’t steal,” Munira said. She bent over the maps and snapped a photo while watching Alvara out of the corner of her eye. “I just made a couple of copies.”
“That’s stealing!” the ghouleh snapped. “I don’t sell maps. I sell the license to a map. I retain the copyright, and if you make illicit copies, you’re ripping me off!”
Munira stared at her, a little incredulous. “You do realize that your entire client base is made of thieves and killers, don’t you?”
But Alvara’s petulant outrage evaporated as she realized which file Munira was copying. “Are you planning to go Below? Are you going to hurt Soledad?”
Munira looked at her warily. “I’m planning to steal something from her, yeah.”
“Munira, do you know what Soledad does to carrionkind? Haven’t you wondered why there are so few of us in Port Nightfall? Honey, I used to have a husband and children.” There was a quiet moment as Munira tried to think of something to say. She couldn’t. “Come along,” Alvara said, standing. “Bring those maps.”
The ghouleh cleared her desk by sweeping everything to the floor, then laid out the sheets of paper to form one large map. “I’ve been grabbing Soledad’s creatures, one at a time, to learn what I can. Not so many that she’d notice, but my map is nearly complete. There are five ways in that I know of. To the north, there’s an unused pipe on the lowest floor of the sewage treatment plant, but everyone knows about that.”
“That’s where the spiders are.”
“Don’t try to get past the spiders. You smell too good. To the west, there’s an underwater grotto, just beneath Pier Twelve.”
“Really?”
“Don’t go that way, either. I mean it. The necromancer doesn’t just experiment on humans, or dogs, or combining humans with dogs. Or horses. Or—”
“Okay, I get it.”
“No, you don’t. You really don’t. Just don’t even try entering that way. Please?”
“I hear you.”
“To the south, in the basement of an old paper mill, is the front door. That’s the ‘official’ entrance to her domain, where she does business if she’s got business to do.”
“That’s where Tariq was killed.”
“Yes,” Alvara said. “He tried to bluff his way in through the front door. Very stupid.”
“There are two more?”
“Here’s what most people don’t know: Nearly every storm drain in the city can get you down there. You drop into the catch basin and slip into the drain itself. The dead patrol there, too, but the pipes are bigger and cleaner than they are in the sewers. Big enough, maybe, for a large dog. It is not far from there to the palace tunnels that Soledad’s undead servants use to travel beneath the city.”
Munira’s father, an ifrit, could change his shape and enter through those pipes, but she didn’t have that much fire. “And the fifth?”
“That is the best one! Look here! This office building, just six blocks from city hall, is on the edge of the Tacktown neighborhood.”
“You mean Cracktown.”
“The crack is mostly gone. Now it is simply poor again. Soledad grabs many of her victims from this part of the city, because the people are poor and no one cares very much. But this office building is built on a foundation of friction piles.”
“Um, what?”
“Friction piles.” Alvara sighed. “Long wooden rods driven into the ground to hold the building in place, like the bristles of a hairbrush pressed into the dirt.”
“Okay.”
“Some of these wooden piles are unusually large, and one of them has been hollowed out. Soledad’s palace is there, under this building, and nobody knows but her and me. And now you.”
Munira was quiet a moment. She didn’t need Alvara’s insistence that she avoid the western entrance. Ifrits—even half-ifrits—don’t like large bodies of water. She also had no intention of knocking on Soledad’s front door and introducing herself.
But what about the other options? The northern entrance would have fewer of the living dead, if only because the spiders ate them. The storm drains would be well defended, if she could even get inside. And the hollow piling that led straight to the palace would lead straight into the heart of Soledad’s power.
She took out her camera again to snap more pictures of the map. “Oh, put that away,” Alvara said. “I have a color scanner right here. And I can email a high-res picture to your phone.” She opened a cabinet behind her, revealing three shelves of electronic equipment. “Who will you see for your equipment? Karl the Mole? The Rascal? Wendy Feathers is missing, you know.”
“I heard she was dead.”
“Wendy gets herself killed every three or four years. It doesn’t stick.”
“I was thinking I’d go to see Wide-Awake Joe.”
“What?” Alvara turned to her, shocked. “He’s a human!”
“But he’s Wide Awake. He also sells reliable gear. I don’t know where Rascal gets his stuff, but I can’t depend on it anymore. He nearly got me arrested six months ago.”
Alvara shrugged and went back to her equipment. Within five minutes, Munira had three copies of the complete map in various sizes, and a ping from her phone letting her know the file had arrived.
“Thank you,” Munira said. “What do I owe you?” The ghouleh’s maps were expensive. A map of a mansion or a museum could cost three thousand U.S. She was almost afraid to hear what a map to the home of the most dangerous woman on the western half of the continent would cost.
Alvara looked at her steadily, her face still showing the partial transformation to a jackal. “One dollar U.S.”
Munira pulled four quarters from her pant pocket and set them on the edge of the desk. They nodded to each other, and Munira left feeling oddly elated.
That good feeling—along with the stink of the ghouleh’s apartment—lingered when she strolled into a dingy bar called the Clay Lantern not half an hour later. Wide-Awake Joe was an American who said he’d moved to Baja “for the women.” He had also somehow learned that there was a supernatural world existing alongside his mundane human one. Rather than become a wizard, as most humans did, he became a salesman, and the back booth of this dark, run-down bar was his general store
.
“Munira!” he called when he saw her. “My God, how gorgeous you are! Every time, it’s like I’m seeing an angel.”
“You’re packing on the pounds, Joe.” Munira nodded toward the potbelly straining against his silk shirt. She sat across from him in the booth, keeping her suitcase very, very close. “And you forgot to shave this week.”
“I could use a few plugs up top, too, eh?” he said, stroking his receding hairline. “Believe me, I know you’re out of my league, babe. I’m just saying you are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen in my life. Testify!”
“Arielle—you remember her? My partner?—says you tell her the same thing, word for word.”
Joe shrugged, unembarrassed. “What can I say? I’m running a business here.”
Americans. Munira couldn’t help it. She laughed. “I need a standard number five kit, Joe.”
“It won’t be the standard price. Ah ah ah!” He held up his hand to ward off her objection. “There’s nothing I can do about it, angel-face. Temesis is prepping for something big, and supplies are scarce. However, if you want to buy a little bag of oregano and sawdust from I Rascal, be my guest.”
“How much more?”
“Fifty percent.”
“Fifty?”
“I know, I know. You think I like it? I’m getting reamed here, too! It’s cutting into my profits. I had to hock two of my rings!” He held out his hand to show that his thumbs were unadorned, though he still wore gold on the other digits.
“Fine.”
“And that’s U.S., sweetie, like always. You want some undead packets? Don’t give me that look! There’s been a lot of interest lately.”
That caught her interest, too. One touch of a properly made packet, and the animated dead lost their animation. Then she remembered: Twenty-four hours. “No,” Munira said. “I don’t have time to wait for them.”
“But that’s the beautiful thing: They’re already made. A were-jaguar thought he might be in a little trouble with you-know-who and asked me to get twenty for him, which I did. Then he had the nerve to lowball the price! I wouldn’t play and he stormed out. Next morning his friends found his apartment wrecked but no were-jaguar, which to me means he should have paid, right? The best part is that these babies are still fresh, only three days old!”