Onderishta laid her fists on the table before her. “All right. No one is to talk about this Lost Ward business outside of this room. Understand? If anyone asks, tell them our investigation is incomplete. Rumors of a Lost Ward have been around since I was small, and nothing ever comes of it. Talking about it now will make people think we’ve lost our minds. Trillistin, come here.” She opened a chest on the shelf behind her. Once she found the token she was looking for, she pressed it into the boy’s hand. “Take this to Gray Flames. Do you know my boss’s name? It’s Hulmanis defe-Firos. Show this at the gate and you’ll be taken to his office. He needs to know about the beetles, and you’re going to tell him. He should know about good work you did.” She tousled his close-cropped hair.
“Thank you,” he said.
“If the ear is small…” Fay said, letting his voice trail off. “That’s dangerous, isn’t it?”
Trillistin moved slowly, hoping to overhear her answer. Onderishta gestured for him to sit. “That’s why I was late. It took all morning to bully the medical bureaucrats to tell me exactly what will happen if a glitterkind is cut too often or too deeply. The pawnbroker insisted I needed to know. He said it could cost the life of every living soul in Koh-Salash.”
All three stared at her expectantly. She began to explain what she’d learned.
* * *
The crowds helped.
The beetle moved through Low Market, and as Kyrioc followed, he stayed in the shadows of the decks above as much as possible. His cloak of mirrors wouldn’t work in full daylight, but the daylight couldn’t touch him here, and the crowds of shoppers and sellers made the magic stronger.
But the boy was quick and darted through a crowd the way only small children could. Kyrioc tried to keep pace, but pushing through traffic—or drawing attention to himself in any way—was risky. His cloak made people see what they expected, not what was there. Whenever he did something unexpected, even if it did nothing more than make someone look twice, it weakened the magic of the cloak.
Then, as he hurried through an intersection, someone on a platform above moved something suddenly—a huge placard or a hanging canvas—and a shaft of sunlight fell directly onto Kyrioc. His cloak of mirrors vanished like a wisp of fog.
A pair of ironshirts standing guard on the cross street glanced at him, then looked again. At the same moment, the boy ducked into an alleyway.
Slipping into an ironmonger’s shop, Kyrioc pressed his fingers to his lips, vaulted the counter, and ducked into the back. The man at the counter called for him to halt, but Kyrioc had already reached the alley.
Alarmed by the shopkeeper’s cry, the boy turned around as Kyrioc ducked around the corner of the building. The stamp of small feet running on wood sounded out. The boy sprinted straight toward another shop door.
The street was narrow and the windows on the right had been shuttered. Kyrioc leaped for the balcony and pulled himself up, then slipped through a broken shutter.
The place smelled like decomposing rat. The back wall was stained with piss streaks and the floor covered by broken crates, crooked shelving, and pigeon shit.
Peering through a crack in the shutter, Kyrioc saw the constables emerge from the ironmonger’s shop. They looked around, then started down the alley in the opposite direction from the boy.
Kyrioc hurried to the end of the building. The door the boy had run for was shut tight. When he appeared, Kyrioc would have to move quickly from his hiding place to keep up.
Someone passed very close to the gap in the shutter. Kyrioc stepped back, a floorboard creaking under his tread. The door latch rattled, but it was rotten and wouldn’t release. A booted foot smashed the door inward, and the constables who had followed him into the ironmonger’s shop forced their way through.
“This is him,” the lead said. He was about Kyrioc’s age, and had the flattened nose of a fighter. “This is the asshole that broke my cousin’s knee.”
The one behind him was bigger. “He’s gonna look good in a collar.” Both men drew their truncheons.
Kyrioc stepped away from the daylight streaming through the door.
The ironshirts grinned confidently. They were armed and armored. He was not. They thought they had every advantage.
As the first constable stepped forward, he swung his truncheon downward in a swift diagonal stroke. Kyrioc pivoted inside the swing, caught the constable’s wrist, and flipped him to the floor.
The noise of his armored form striking the boards was gigantic. Kyrioc had to hurry. He sidestepped the second constable, kicking low. The man landed atop his partner. Both cried out, but the fellow on the bottom got the worst of it.
Kyrioc quickly stomped on the big one’s ankle. He howled, rolling over and trying to clutch at his injured leg despite his bulky breastplate.
The first ironshirt had already scrambled onto his hands and knees, truncheon still in his grip. Kyrioc stomped on his hand, breaking three of his fingers. This one didn’t cry out—he was too much of a fighter for that—but the expression on his face showed he was beaten and knew it. He expected to die.
Stripping off their helmets, Kyrioc struck each on the side of the jaw. They slumped to the floor, helpless and dazed. The effect wouldn’t last long but it was the best he could do. He wasn’t going to waste the lives of honest constables. Not today.
He hurried back to the bright side of the room, wondering if the boy had already left. As he approached the shutter, the shop door swung outward and the boy stepped out, looking warily in every direction. He’d exchanged his rag doll for a second wooden one. The boy hurried away. Kyrioc yanked open the shutter and vaulted over the balcony rail.
Only to find two more ironshirts waiting for him. Both were lanky, with knife scars on their faces. “Well, well,” the tall one said. “Black Apricot is paying for scar-faced men. Looks like we get an extra visit to the brothel this week.” They didn’t draw their truncheons, because they were already holding bared knives. “Come peacefully, and live.”
Kyrioc slid the Childfall Staff from his belt.
It was almost a foot long when he held it at his side, but a second later, when the grinning constables tried to flank him, it was as long as a soldier’s broadsword.
He left their corpses, armor crushed and flesh burning, in the alley.
Kyrioc ran around the curving plankway, sliding his weapon—once again reduced to the length of his hand—back into his belt. He was in pursuit of the beetle, yes, but he also needed to burn off the flood of shameful joy that welled within him.
He had wasted lives again. For seven years, he had survived by bringing death to enemy and prey, until the desire to take life had become a living thing inside him. A dragon. He’d hoped he could leave the dragon on Vu-Dolmont, but that was a fool’s wish and he knew it.
He’d also hoped the dragon would slumber on the horde of lives he had already fed it.
It had, if uneasily.
But he was wasting lives again, one after another. And now that his enemies knew about his cloaks, his chances of slipping away unnoticed with Riliska were dwindling. To free his friend, he was going to have to fight.
And that thought made his dragon stir.
He spotted the beetle—those little wooden dolls clutched to his chest—creeping warily toward two figures at the top of a distant stair. One was a hulking man with hands like sledges, and the other was a small, lithe woman holding a slender spear.
Weapons of that length were illegal inside city limits, with very few exceptions, so she must have been a licensed bodyguard. Judging by the way the pickpockets and other alley rats averted their eyes, the beetle was her charge.
The bodyguards led the child down the stair, and Kyrioc followed as closely as he could. The farther down they went, the deeper the shadows, until they reached the bare wood and endless twilight of the bottom of Koh-Salash.
It felt good to be out of the daylight. Kyrioc summoned his cloak of mirrors and hunched his shoulders to match the cro
wd of drinkers huddled beneath the stairs. Down here, there was nothing but forgotten people and heavy plankways built for transporting goods to upcity shops.
A carriage pulled by two horses came around a cluster of wooden pylons, and the boy clambered inside. The carriage driver heard the door click shut and snapped the reins, riding off toward the south.
Kyrioc followed.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
The idea was Trillistin’s.
Onderishta marveled at the simplicity of it. She had never considered the idea that growing up as a servant in a noble house—even a minor one—would have trained him to quiet deception, but it made sense. What else could explain the boy’s devious mind?
Mirishiya and three constables poured water over their heads, then stumbled down a set of stairs from High Apricot into Wild Dismal. They didn’t run. They wheezed and reeled as though they were exhausted, chasing a little thief and pushing themselves to the limits of their endurance.
The heavies standing guard on the Pails’ warehouse loved it. They looked at the drenched faces, the men with their mouths hanging open, and the exaggerated slow-motion strides of the armored constables, and jeered.
“Make them work for it, girl!”
“Better pick up the pace, fat asses!”
“That little girl is shaming you. Shaming you!”
When one of the heavies offered to help Mirishiya—and she told them to fuck off—they laughed at her impertinence. Onderishta knew they wouldn’t have found Trillistin so amusing, even if he could swear naturally, which he couldn’t.
At the main doors, Mirishiya sprinted away at the same moment the constables, no longer pretending to be exhausted, rushed the door.
A dozen more ironshirts were a block behind, and they weren’t playacting. The first three hit the doors before they could be barred and held them open until the main force arrived.
By the fallen gods, it was good work and a much-needed victory. Onderishta clapped Trillistin’s shoulder and marched down the street to take possession of everything the Pails owned in this world.
* * *
Killer of Devils did not like loitering in Wild Dismal, but his employer said it was necessary, and it was not his duty to argue. At least her younger brother was well hidden while overseeing his new responsibilities.
But Tin could not abandon the warehouse without first collecting her records, her surgeon, and the coin she kept there. Her new role as the head of the syndicate had already earned twice the coin she had saved, but Killer’s employer was not wasteful or extravagant. What she had acquired, she would keep.
That included her old headquarters.
“It kept us safe for six years,” she had said. “It’s my home.”
“A castle is only as safe as the troops guarding it.”
She had nodded thoughtfully, then begun plans to relocate. Killer was simultaneously glad and disappointed. The great tribal leaders he had known in his youth, commanders of legions of fierce warriors, had rarely been open to good counsel.
Killer was glad his employer valued his opinion. It disappointed him that she was making the smart, safe move. The longer it took for this woman and her brother to be taken from this world, the longer he would be stuck in this doomed city.
The narcotics had already been relocated, along with the dolls the beetles used to hide the money. But the surgeon Harl had used—an elderly Carrig—had either fled the city or died in The Caves. Tin needed her addict.
A roar of laughter sounded from outside. While Killer strained to hear what the heavies were yelling, Tin shoved High Cap toward the door. “Fetch my doctor and follow.”
He hurried away.
Tin muscled her leather satchel over her shoulder. It bulged with coin, mostly copper knots and sails. She would not travel quickly with that load.
Then she surprised him. “Killer of Devils,” she said—it was only the second time she had said his name aloud—“do you remember the emergency exit I showed you on your first day here?”
He did. In the back room, Killer tilted the shelves, then lifted the trapdoor beneath, revealing a set of stairs. When he stepped on them, his weight lowered the far end until it struck a public stair down into Shadetree.
He led the way into safety.
* * *
Night fell as the beetle’s carriage passed into Spillwater. Kyrioc quickened his pace to close the gap between them, in case his quarry began to weave through the streets.
In his youth, the leaking sewer lines that gave the Spillwater deck its name had kept him from coming to the south end of downcity, but since his return, he’d passed through several times. The houses had been built of cast-off wood and tarred skins, and the plankways creaked under his tread. Rotting garbage and other random trash had been arranged into impromptu basins and gutters, to capture the splash and flow from leaking pipes, some of which fell all the way from Dawnshine. The stench was like poison.
Shadowy forms moved furtively down alleys, heading for the stairs and lifts that would take them upcity for their night’s occupation. There were a few honest folk down on this deck, but they didn’t survive long.
After only three blocks, the carriage turned eastward, then northward, onto another descending ramp. There was only one district below and it was, if possible, even more hellish than this one. Mudside.
When they descended far enough to be even with the top of the inner wall, they hit a guard station. This post wasn’t controlled by ordinary constables. Salashi soldiers armed with pikes and bearing full helms forged into devil faces stood here. The carriage needed only to pause briefly.
Kyrioc—once he called up his cloak of mirrors—was waved through.
Coming back the other way would be complicated. The damned could descend, but they were no longer welcome above.
Farther down, at the edges of the plankway, there were two torches and two stools and two men to sit on them. Both were inches from a hundred-foot plunge into the muck below. Machetes rested on their laps. The carriage barely slowed as one of the men lit a taper from his torch and transferred the flame to the carriage lantern.
With a nod of gratitude, the driver headed down into the darkness.
Kyrioc shuffled his step, hung his head, and called up his cloak of mirrors again. Most of those who entered Mudside were driven there by debt, addiction, or other calamity. He played the part. The heavies glared but did not address him.
The carriage pulled farther away with each second.
There were five more pairs of torches on the road down to Mudside, each well guarded. Kyrioc kept to the center of the plankway, where the light from the torches was dimmest. The heavies watched him but did not challenge him or try to shake him down. He was just another of life’s losers falling out of the world.
The carriage slowed as the ramp descended to the top of Yth’s ribs. This far downcity, torches and lanterns burned everywhere, but there were few moving figures and only one moving light. Eventually, that light made its way to Yth’s last rib, then turned westward toward the spine. The dim lantern vanished as it passed behind a building.
Kyrioc made his inexorable way forward. Without a carriage on the road, the heavies guarding it had no interest in anything but throwing dice. The air reeked of overturned chamber pots. The stink of the leaking sewer pipes that gave the Spillwater deck its name was concentrated here, because this was where those leaks drained to. The heat of the summer’s day lingered, and the inner wall, the decks above, and Salash Hill blocked the ocean breezes that might have brought relief.
But from the vantage point of the ramp, Kyrioc could look across the open space, here at the bottom of this doomed city, and see the outline of Yth’s skeleton told with pinpricks of firelight. It would have been beautiful, if the air had not made every pore and follicle on his body feel foul.
At the last rib, when Kyrioc turned to follow the path of the beetle’s carriage, the last two guards took hold of their machetes.
“This ain’t
for you. Get down in the muck.” They pointed northward.
On the far side of Yth’s last rib was a set of stairs leading downward. Kyrioc could see nothing down there, not firelight, not movement. He could only hear the trickle of flowing water, and the sound of someone far away pleading for mercy.
The southernmost edge of Low Market, built upon Yth’s hipbones, stood about a third of a mile away. As far as Kyrioc could see, on this level, only the long, firelit god’s spine connected the place he stood with that neighborhood. There might have been plankways down in the muck and darkness, but he couldn’t see them.
“Get down the stairs,” the heavy called to him, “or we’ll throw you down.”
Kyrioc descended. After two dozen stairs, he was out of the torchlight. He dropped his cloak of mirrors.
If he found Riliska here, he had few choices for getting her out: down the spine to the dubious safety of Low Market, descend into the sewage-soaked mud, or return the way he came, either fighting or in disguise. He had no plan and no need for one.
He crept back up the stairs. The heavies had moved back to the light of their torches. Inside his cloak of shadows, he slipped past them.
In Mudside, each rib was its own small district. The eastern end of this rib curved upward and ended far above the northern edge of Woodgarden. However, the back of the bone had sunk so deep into the mud that the rib stood barely fifty feet above it.
Here, the gangsters of Koh-Salash had built a miniature deck, over three hundred feet wide and more than eight hundred feet long, from the road to Yth’s spine.
But Kyrioc could not find the carriage. If it had ridden all the way to the spine, he’d have no idea where to search. North back to Low Market? South toward one of the other ribs or even Yth’s skull?
No, the route was too circuitous. This had to be the carriage’s destination. Kyrioc spun about. There was a small open stadium with a sandy pit in the middle, but it was in such disrepair that he doubted anyone had fought there in years.
Across the street from it was a row of rotting vendors’ stalls built around brick ovens.
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