by D. J. Butler
Ilsa nodded. “Probably.”
Indrajit looked to his left, seeing staggered ranks of decayed walls that formed a maze. “I know right now that north is that way. But I also know that once we’ve turned around a couple of those walls, I’ll have lost track of north completely. Does anyone have a lodestone?”
“Apsurd.” Holy-Pot snorted dismissively. “I don’t need a lodestone. I’ll take us to the northernmost exit.”
“You spend a lot of time down here?” Fix asked.
“It’s not that large, and it’s not that complicated.” Holy-Pot led them in a meandering line that for a brief while followed a stream of thick, dark liquid gurgling in a channel it had carved into the stone, then turned away and instead marched alongside a length of wall that, instead of orange brick, was made of black stones, each as large as a man, and finally wove left and right through a field of leaning brick columns. They spoke little, because every word came back to them as a whisper from the void, and their footsteps bounced off unseen surfaces and created phantom stalkers for Indrajit to imagine.
Finally, Holy-Pot Diaphernes stopped at a door. It was indistinguishable from Frodilo Choot’s in being a large, iron-bound wooden slab, with a heavy knocker in the center, but it was wedged into a corner, the walls angling sharply away from it in two directions, both wall sections slimy to the touch, smelling of sulfur, and vaguely green.
Indrajit tried not to gag.
Holy-Pot used the knocker vigorously, and was rewarded after a minute with a voice calling from the other side of the door. “Who is it?”
“Holy-Pot Diaphernes. Open up, Feen.”
“Eh, how do I know it’s really Holy-Pot?”
“You know pecause the last time you and I jointly syndicated a risk-contract, it was a muleskinner off to Ngharâdu-Isst, who claimed to have found a shortcut to the farther reaches of the Endless Road, that avoided poth the pandits and the powder priests. When he left his pones pleaching on the sand and his widow sued, we were aple to avoid payment because the judge ruled that their marriage was never properly formalized and that therefore she wasn’t his heir.”
“All of that…could be found in the public record,” Feen said slowly.
“We priped the judge.” Holy-Pot shot a harsh glare at Indrajit. “I will deny all this, if it ever comes up.”
Indrajit shrugged. On a better day, he might have been bothered by the thought of working for someone willing to corrupt a judge. On this day, he didn’t have the time to think about it.
“Also, you’ve never learned how to pronounce the letter B.” Feen opened the door. He was a shriveled man with eyes like gleaming yellow coconuts and skin like an old leather bag, wrinkled, cracked, and reddish in the light of the oil lamp he held. “Eh, Spilkar’s purse-strings, you’ve joined a jobber company.”
Holy-Pot shook his head, passing Feen and climbing the steps up into his shop. “The men in orange are looking for me. It’s nothing, just a contract dispute. This is put a disguise to throw them off the track.”
“Eh, it would work better if you didn’t have two faces.”
Ilsa followed, then Fix, and finally Indrajit. Indrajit nodded and smiled a friendly greeting, and Feen ignored him. Indrajit was almost offended, and then realized that Feen’s eyes had settled into the glazed look that suggested he had been overwhelmed by Ilsa’s uncanny power.
Feen had no customers at the moment, being apparently engaged in examining and transcribing records at his counter. Indrajit stepped out in the street first, and saw that Holy-Pot had been good to his word; the trip through the underworld had taken them beyond the borders of the Paper Sook proper, and even past the first leg of the Crooked Mile. There wasn’t an orange tunic in sight.
“Come on,” he called in to the others. “Let’s go to the opera.”
Chapter Thirteen
“It’s a chest,” Ilsa without Peer said. “A chest of certain items that I need.”
“Rare items, I suppose?” Indrajit asked. “Because if not, we could just replace them in Pelth or wherever.”
The singer fixed Indrajit with an icy eye. Courting Flower notwithstanding, he felt daunted, and rocked half a step sideways in his walk. “I am no creature of vanity, risking my own life and yours for makeup or some frivolity. This chest contains…things I need. Things…relating to my race.”
Indrajit imagined a chest packed full of mud and rare seaweed, in which the singer had to sleep. Or crawling with juicy little amphibians, that made up her entire diet—despite the gruesomeness of the thought, his stomach rumbled from hunger; the bread and cheese would tide him over, but he was still hungry. Or maybe Ilsa was a symbiote, and the other half of her lived inside a chest. Maybe the top portion of her skull, which seemed to be missing.
“Okay,” he said. “I didn’t doubt you.”
The risk-merchant and the singer wore large orange tunics over their clothing, and all four of them trooped up through the Crown. In the afternoon, many of Kish’s wealthy inhabitants took constitutional strolls, and in such strolling exhibited the latest fashion, cut from the finest silks and cotton. In his baggy tunic and linen kilt held up with rope, Indrajit might pass for the servant of one of the strollers, at best.
He avoided making eye contact.
“Since people—lots of people—are looking for Ilsa,” he said, “Fix and I will go into the building and bring out the chest.”
Then he stopped. The others staggered awkwardly, halting and then regrouping around him. Passing strollers, too important to curse at the inconvenience, shot Indrajit a heavily lidded gaze like sunning serpents.
Indrajit grabbed Fix and Ilsa by the wrists and dragged them onto a less-busy side street. “Something has been bothering me all day.” He shook his head. “I finally realized what it was.”
“The fact that people are trying to kill you?” Fix asked.
Indrajit shook his head. “I won’t say I’m used to that, but you must admit, it comes with the territory.”
“Yes, but now people like Orem Thrush appear to be trying to kill you.”
Indrajit waved the concern away. “If Thrush wanted me dead, I’d be dead now. He wanted me compliant.”
“I can see he failed.”
“I’m stubborn that way.”
“What has been bothering you?” Ilsa asked.
“On the stage last night,” Indrajit said. “The jobber knew my name.”
Ilsa’s nictitating membranes flapped twice. “The man who attacked me?” she sang.
“No, the Luzzazza. He called me by my name.”
“We talked about this,” Fix said. “You wondered whether the Luzzazza might be mind readers.”
“Yeah, but I don’t think they are.” Indrajit sucked at the new gap in his teeth. “And I also don’t think I’m famous enough that some random jobber should just know me, if I run into him on the street.”
“Maybe the Luzzazza wasn’t a random jobber,” Fix suggested. “Maybe he was a connoisseur of the Blaatshi Epic.”
Indrajit hissed. “I should have asked Frodilo Choot. I missed my opportunity. She hired them. Diaphernes, did you tell them about me? Or did you tell Choot?”
Holy-Pot looked stumped. “I might have,” he admitted. “When she engaged me to repurchase her risk on the contract, I might have mentioned that I was thinking of having you watch whatever joppers she engaged.”
“Is it strange that she would tell them?” Indrajit asked. “I mean, why would they need to know?”
“Maybe so they would know that you were on their side, if your paths crossed on the job?” Fix suggested.
“Only the Luzzazza didn’t act like he thought we were on the same side. He acted like he thought I was guilty.”
“Heat of the moment?” Holy-Pot suggested. “Mistake? Professional jealousy?”
At the last suggestion, Indrajit laughed out loud. “Yes, that sounds right. A magician-mystic in a famous jobber company is envious of my many accomplishments as a mercenary. So envio
us, he calls me out by name as he attacks me in hand-to-hand combat.”
Indrajit pushed the questions back into a dark corner of his mind, but the mystery remained.
“But the point,” he said, “is that I’m known. If Gannon’s Handlers are watching the Palace of Shadow and Joy, at least, then they know who I am.”
“The Palace is just down the street,” Fix said to Ilsa. “Tell me what I’m looking for and I’ll go in.”
“Yes, this is an excellent idea.” Indrajit laughed. “What are you going to do, show them your fascicle? Read to them from a registry so they let you in?”
“I’ll say whatever you tell me.” Fix’s face was earnest.
“No, you’re no liar. You don’t have the poetry in you to tell an easy lie. If you try to talk your way in, you’ll be spotted in a heartbeat.” Indrajit took a deep breath. “I’ll do it.”
Though if Pink Face were watching the door again, Indrajit might have some explaining to do.
“We could just walk in, and ignore anyone who tries to stop us,” Fix suggested. “We only have to be in there long enough to grab the chest.” He turned to Ilsa. “Is it easy to find? Is it labeled?”
“It’s not in my dressing room,” she said. “It’s hidden under the stage. You’re going to have to take me in there with you.”
Ilsa had tried to direct Indrajit to escape the Palace of Shadow and Joy the first time by going underneath the stage. Perhaps she had wanted to collect this chest back then.
Indrajit sighed. “Well, that rules out my best plan.”
“Which was?” Fix asked.
“Steal a chariot and crash it through the front door. Grab the box, race it out the back door.”
“You really don’t know how horses work, do you?”
“I know how they work in the Epic.”
“How’s that?”
“Foreigners ride them, and they taste good.”
“That’s not wrong, as far as it goes.”
“Fortunately, I have come up with another plan.” Indrajit turned to Ilsa. “Your dressing room has windows…am I remembering that right? Can you tell us from the outside which windows belong to your room?”
Ilsa nodded. “They’ll be on the second floor.”
“Be nice if we had a saddlebroken Ylakka. We could climb right up the wall. I’ve seen Ylakka climb walls smooth as glass to get to the dragon eggs at the top.”
“Have you seen it?” Fix asked. “Or have you heard about it in the Epic?”
Indrajit ignored him. “Lacking an Ylakka, or a wizard to lift us up into the windows, or any skill at pole vaulting, I think we can probably make do with a tall wagon.”
With a little walking, Indrajit found a Rover wagon. It stood a quarter mile from the Palace of Shadow and Joy, and its drivers—smiths and jewelers and horse tamers, like so many Rovers were—had set up an impromptu stall in a small plaza. Rovers covered their wagons with painted images of clan totem animals, which in this case appeared to be the otter. Armored otters, winged otters, and swimming otters circled in bright colors around an otter swinging a heavy hammer above a forge.
Beside the wagon, a burly, mustachioed man was repairing horseshoes and skillets while the woman at his side plaited hair and sold ornaments to be pinned into it. A younger man hung back, keeping an eye on the tall, arch-backed wagon. When Indrajit whispered into his ear what he had in mind, and pressed one of Ilsa’s Imperials into his palm, he nodded.
Ilsa turned out to be surprisingly nimble. After Indrajit climbed to the top of the wagon and lay on his belly, extending a hand down to help her, she fairly sprang up under her own power. The cool evening breeze—the sun was beginning to set in the west, and on the far side of the Palace of Shadow and Joy, the evening’s audience was filing into the opera house—blew a wave of her scent into Indrajit’s face, and he was reminded how exotic and potent it was. Mercifully, he still wore a sprig of the Courting Flower.
“You should wait outside,” Fix suggested to Holy-Pot.
He shook both heads in answer. “And pe caught alone py the joppers who purned down my office?”
The risk-merchant had the most difficulty climbing, but with Fix’s and Indrajit’s help, he at last lay, as flat as he could, on the curving, gold-painted wood, and the Rover, after introducing himself as Virti, flicked his horses into motion with a short whip.
The street alongside the tradesmen’s entrance to the Palace was not as quiet as Indrajit would have liked. Couriers, carpenters, tailors, make-up artists, and the actors choked up the street, each trying to get recognized at the same time by Pink Face the doorman.
Fortunately, that created something of an obstruction, slowing the street’s traffic dramatically. No one looked twice when Virti brought his horses to a stop at the spot indicated by Ilsa. No one looked twice despite the fact that, under the broad brim of his hat, Virti was a startlingly handsome young man.
The windows were open. Looking now, Indrajit saw that they didn’t have glass to shut, but wooden slats that would be pulled over the windows and probably barred in the event of stormy weather. On a cool, balmy spring day like this, leaving the windows wide open would let the air inside circulate.
Ilsa went up first, and quickly.
“Where did she say her people lived?” Fix whispered. “Some mountain pass, or the tops of trees? She climbs like a monkey.”
“A valley with a river, I think.” Indrajit shrugged, keeping his eyes on the crowd, none of whom looked in his direction. “Ask her, if you’re curious.”
The two jobbers hoisted Holy-Pot up together. The risk-merchant went up inhaling sharply, and Ilsa dragged him into the window with her apparently powerful arms.
Indrajit made his fingers into a stirrup—he knew that much about horses—to push Fix up, and then went up himself. It was an easy climb. Beneath Ilsa’s windows ran a ledge, and carved serpentine monsters, four-eyed demons, and lewd groupings of unknown gods arranged their bodies into spouts to send water cascading off the building and over the heads of pedestrians below, into the street proper. The sculptures offered excellent handholds, and Indrajit knew how to climb.
You had to, when you grew up along seaside cliffs, and sometimes the best mussels, or crabs, or fish eggs, were located at the bottom of a steep rock face.
Once inside, he looked down at the street again, to be certain no one was looking up. He signaled with his hand to Virti, who signaled back, and then settled in to wait. This Rover band, apparently, was one of those that knew the secret of Thûlian powder; the Rover had a brace of pistols tucked into his sash. So much the better, since it meant it would be harder for a hostile party to move Virti against his will.
Ilsa’s dressing room door was shut. Indrajit now saw a small bright green bush in the corner of the room, speckled with blotches of yellow, which he recognized as the Courting Flower.
“How do we get to the space peneath the stage, with the show apout to go on?” Holy-Pot asked, fussing with his hands.
“This is the easy part.” Indrajit looked at Ilsa and gestured at a rack of costumes. “You dress up to hide who you are, I’ll get us some costumes.”
He grabbed three spear-bearers’ costumes from a rack in the hallway below, just as he had the evening before, but this time with the addition of helmets. Helmets made of balsa wood, with balsa wood faceguards that completely concealed the wearers’ features.
When he reentered the dressing room, Ilsa had hidden her own face inside a hood and was draping a crimson cloak about her, Fix and Holy-Pot facing away from her. Ilsa’s build was still obvious through the costume, and when her fingers flashed into view, Indrajit thought he could easily identify her himself, but dressed like this, in the hubbub of the opera actually being performed, no one would spot her.
Her black cape and the rough orange tunics lay on the floor—Indrajit picked up the latter and tucked them into the pocket of his kilt, just in case. The orange fabric made his kilt bulge out ludicrously, like a mushroom cap.
/>
Fix and Holy-Pot climbed into their costumes, Fix looking amused and Holy-Pot appearing more distressed by the minute. As Indrajit reached for the door to leave again, Ilsa caught him by the forearm.
“What if they see me?” she asked. “What if they attack me again?”
“Would you rather wait here?” he asked. “Fix can stay with you.”
“The chest is heavy,” she said. “You’ll need him.”
“I’ll stay.” Holy-Pot smiled. “I don’t think I’d pe that useful in a fight, in any case, even if this spear wasn’t a prop.”
Ilsa gave Indrajit directions: down the hallway onto the stage, then behind the curtains and across the stage to a staircase at the far side, then a left turn and look for a door labeled The Queen of All Islands.
“Another reason I ought to be along,” Fix murmured.
Indrajit ignored him.
Inside that room, Ilsa explained, there was a large blue leather chest, with the name Ilsa written on it. It should be easy to find, since the theater allowed her to use that room as her exclusive storage closet.
“Large, but light enough that the two of us should be able to carry it?” Indrajit asked.
She nodded.
“Keep the door locked,” Fix suggested.
The director and the extras and the other opera personnel standing at the wing of the stage ignored Indrajit and Fix. They slipped behind the red curtains as the Imperial harps banged an improbable chord and two men traded insults in song.
“You know,” Fix murmured, “this opera house is named after the city.”
“It’s not called Kish,” Indrajit said.
“No. But the Palace of Shadow and Joy was the official name of the palace of the Emperor of Kish, for about three hundred years, right down to the last Emperor. It burned down the night he died, and when the Refounders, the first lords of the great families, paid to have this theater built, they named it after his palace. The palace where they had all worked as servants.”
“So it’s not named after the city.” Indrajit found the staircase and they climbed down into shadow, lit only by shafts of light from above. Indrajit thought of the latrine in the Paper Sook and winced. “It’s named after the old palace.”