by Gregory Ashe
Chapter Twenty
Someone shook Dag. He woke, his hand going to the knife at his belt, but he kept his eyes closed. A foul taste in his mouth—like old wine mixed with something that tasted black and moldy. Laughter, low conversation, the clatter of pewter and ceramic. A tavern, or an inn.
“Sir,” a familiar voice said. “Sir, you’ve been sleeping for a good couple hours. Wouldn’t you prefer your room? Not that I have anything against your staying here, you understand, it’s just . . .”
Dag opened his eyes. Calidi’s face hovered a few inches away from his own, left eye still fluttering, gray hair still short and still oily. “Sir?” he said. “Nothing against your kind, sir, but you can’t hold your liquor. Just like the others I had to throw out, just the same, not a bit different.”
Stifling a moan, Dag pushed himself up from the table. “What time is it?” he asked.
“The first bell past eleven, sir, and already asleep, and when I say your kind can’t hold their liquor, I don’t mean all of you sir, surely you understand that? It’s just that—”
“Quarter past eleven?” Dag said. “What in Ishahb’s burning eye happened? I sat down for one drink, and that had to be two or three hours ago.”
With a small shrug, Calidi said, “The Apsian wine is strong, sir, worth its salt, every drop, and worth the coin, too, sir. You still owe for the wine, sir, if you’re going to bed. No shame if one of your kind can’t hold his wine, you understand. Jaecan wine is so watery, no offense, you understand.”
Dag drew out a coin from his purse, dropped it on the table and stumbled out the door. The wine had hit him hard, and he had less than an hour to make it to Driptangle and the bridge. It hadn’t been hard to find the location—a few questions had revealed that the note was not code at all, just an obscure location in one of the worst sections of the Gut. Driptangle, a pit near the southeast harbor where the poorest of the poor—and, as was almost always the case, the violent who preyed on them—lived.
Ishahb burn me, Dag thought. The streets were dark now, only a few of the great oil lanterns still burning. He had wanted to leave early to scout out the place, make sure Sammeen came alone, but a full day of travel had wiped him out. One glass of wine, I might as well hand the Apsians my own knives and ask them just to finish the job for me.
Few people walked the streets at this hour, and those who did kept their distance from each other. It made Dag’s journey that much easier; he saw no watch, no city guards, patrolling, not even the fool Order that the city prided itself on so much. As he passed one of the large forums, Dag saw that people still shopped and talked beneath bright lanterns, but the crowds were small—apparently even Apsians grew tired of talk eventually, as hard as that was to believe.
No sign or barrier marked the Gut, but Dag could feel the change as he continued down the hill toward the harbor. It happened between one street and the next—hard, immediate, irreversible. One street was lined with neat, if run-down, quiet homes. The next, less than a dozen paces down the hill, was crowded with shadowed figures crouched on stoops and clusters of men at the mouths of alleys. The Gut came alive at night, when the Order did not bother—or perhaps, more correctly, did not dare—to patrol its streets.
Dag made his way down the hill, looking for the turn-off into Driptangle. His headache had faded considerably, but the awful taste lingered in his mouth. Whatever Calidi was selling, it would be better used for cleaning tables.
A few men called out challenges to Dag, but he passed them without response, unwilling to lose any more time. No one followed him—whether because they recognized a dangerous man, or because the men of the Gut preferred an unsuspecting victim, Dag was not sure. He found the narrow dirt trail that led to the Driptangle, a path that ran between burned out buildings into the pit.
It had been a quarry once, someone had told him, but the water filled up too quickly, and too many men drowned. Now the large areas cleared for hauling stone had been covered with homes. It was the unseen sore on Apsia’s buttocks. A fitting image. Apsia, a whorish city, hiding her blemishes beneath gilt and powder.
The path zig-zagged down the rough slope of the pit. Dag drew his knives before going down. Sammeen had picked an unsavory spot to meet. Dag would not put it past the man to plan an ambush; unfortunately, the wine had kept him from scouting out the place. The path down the stony hill, slick with the damp, briny stench that smothered this section of the city, was the perfect place for a man to slip to his death, especially if he had a little help.
Dag took his time negotiating the path. The air grew foul below the level of the city proper, thick with the stench of excrement and rotting garbage. The bottom of the city indeed, he thought. Apsia was a cesspool compared to any self-respecting Jaecan city—no city in Jaegal would leave piles of rotting garbage and waste to stand anywhere within the city, let alone in its most prominent districts. In Apsia, though, men and women alike seemed oblivious to the filth around them. Driptangle was the receptacle of all those flowing streams of ordure, the endpoint, rather than the origin, of refuse.
Shacks and hovels were pitched, apparently at random, throughout the pit, he knew from his earlier investigation. Now, though, without any light except the weak stars, Dag could make out little more than the few steps of stone in front of him, and he trusted to the rest of his senses. Unlike the rest of the Gut, Driptangle was quiet—no rowdy drinking, no clusters of cutpurses or thugs chatting and laughing, no gull-cry whores.
It made Dag uncomfortable. So much misery compacted into one space, and then to find it silent—he felt as though he were dancing at a charnel house while the widows wept; his trespass was obscene in a way that he could not define.
He negotiated the structures of hide and driftwood, grateful for a sense of direction that kept him moving, in spite of the numerous detours and backtrackings, toward the opposite side of the entrance to the pit—a wall of red-orange stone called the Ocher.
More noise here, but nothing that made him comfortable. Deep, heaving coughs. A child crying, then quickly silenced. His own steps sounded loud, harsh, out of place.
He saw the Ocher, its strange hue visible even in the pale light. Dag let out a short breath and followed it east, toward the Third Bridge. A stranger to the city, he had not realized how rare bridges were in Apsia. The Third Bridge had nothing poetic to its name; it was exactly what it claimed to be, a bridge that spanned a narrow finger of the Driptangle that inconvenienced the more decent people who lived on the ridge above.
He stopped when he reached the curtain of vines and old seaweed that hung all the way from the bridge to the ground, dripping with the humidity of the ocean air. The curtain screened off everything under the bridge. It was what gave the area its name. Dag hated it the moment he saw it; it was like some creature drawn from the sea and flayed, the cannibalized embodiment of that unique, pervasive, Apsian fetor.
Dag reached out to part the curtain and drew back as he touched its slimy coating. That recoil saved his life.
A crossbow bolt slammed into the Ocher, cutting through the air where he would have stood if he had stepped forward. The bolt splintered, the cling of steel on stone harmonizing with the loud crack of wood. Dag flipped his daggers up and turned to look for the crossbowman. It was dark, too dark to see anything.
Someone broke through the curtains of vine. Steel flashed in the bleached light. A cutlass swung toward Dag’s head. He parried with his heavier dagger and twisted, catching the blade in the dagger’s curved crossbar. He closed with the other man.
A big, meaty hand struck Dag in the midriff and he stumbled. His free blade—thinner, shorter—opened an artery on the inside of the man’s arm, and the sharp, bitter smell of blood filled Dag’s nose. Dag gasped for breath, but he stabbed again. The blade came up under the man’s ribs, too short to reach his heart. The man screamed. He fell back and disappeared into the darkness under the curtain.
Dag followed. The whine of another crossbow bolt told him he was right to do so. Da
g took two steps before running into another man headfirst. Pain lanced up Dag’s side as he fell backward, his own head ringing. He swung, blindly, in the dark. His daggers caught nothing but air.
His head cleared slightly and Dag pulled himself back until he felt the stone of the Ocher behind him. The wound in his side did not seem bad, but it was impossible to tell in the dark. Just my luck, Dag thought. I ran right into the man’s burning sword for him.
He regained his feet and ignored the wound for the moment. Closing his eyes, Dag forced himself to listen. Leather on stone, the squish of garbage. The sound was sharp in comparison. Dag lunged. He felt his dagger strike home into some fleshy part of the unseen man, although he did not know where. The man let out a yelp and pulled away. Dag heard his cry of pain fade as the man ran.
Two men wounded, perhaps dead. Another outside, somewhere, with a crossbow. Blundering around in the dark was as likely to get Dag killed as anything. He took a deep breath and broke through the curtain of vines, wiping the thick moisture from his face with one sleeve, and ran. Two more bolts struck the hard ground behind him. The wound in his side burned like Ishahb’s holy fires.
Then he was back among the shacks. Heart pounding, legs trembling, Dag ran, blind and lost, in the maze of hovels, until he could hear nothing but his own short, ragged breaths. Still the pit was silent. No one had emerged to investigate the sound of battle, the scream.
Dag found an outcropping of stone along the Ocher and crouched down behind it, one hand pressed over the cut in his side, the other holding the long dagger.
The pit. A burning trap, and Dag had walked right into it. And Ishahb burn me if that burning innkeeper didn’t slip something into my wine. He probably would have dropped me right into Sammeen’s lap if he’d had the guts.
So, Sammeen a traitor. That was a problem. The man knew the city better than Dag, he had a network of spies that could track Dag, find him, kill him. Even worse, Sammeen had been Dag’s main hope for finding Evus and killing him quickly. So much for all of that. Dag clutched the dagger blade a little tighter. He didn’t like torture, but a professional beating no longer seemed an appropriate response. No, when Dag found Sammeen, he was going to take his time getting his questions answered.
No way out of Driptangle now, not when Sammeen could have any number of men waiting at the top of that narrow path. Dag did not fancy getting to the top and finding himself feathered with a dozen bolts. He hunkered down lower besides the stone outcropping, checked the wound again, and settled in to wait for morning.