by D. J. Butler
“A different kind of bet.”
“Stay focused, Fix.”
Fix yelped and let go of the Zalapting. In the gloom, Indrajit saw the metallic flash of a weapon in the little jobber’s hand. He grabbed the Zalapting’s forearm, trying to immobilize him and stop a second attack.
At the same moment, Fix punched the Zalapting in the throat.
The Zalapting crumpled against the wall and was still.
“Fix,” Indrajit said. “Is he dead?”
Fix checked. “Oops. I didn’t mean to hit him that hard.”
“Frozen hells.”
“It wasn’t on purpose. Sorry.” Fix dropped the Zalapting. “I don’t think he knew anything else.”
“Maybe not. Are you bleeding?”
Fix shrugged. “A little.”
Indrajit sighed and thought for a moment. “I wish I had a better plan, but I guess we just leave the body down here. In a week, some poor sap of a jobber with the sewers contract will find it.”
“We should take the tunic and spear, though,” Fix suggested. “There are a hundred thousand Zalaptings in Kish, and if one body more or less turns up, no one will pay it any mind. If a body turns up in Mote Gannon’s uniform, questions will be asked.”
“We will be blamed.”
“True,” Fix said. “Though in this case, we’re actually guilty.”
They were quiet for a moment.
“What do we do, then?” Indrajit asked. “Leave Kish?”
“If we do that, your errand fails, doesn’t it?”
“My errand. You make it sound like I’ve come to the market to buy crusty bread.”
“I don’t mean to trivialize it. But surely, you came to Kish to find an apprentice Recital Thane. Someone to follow you, be the four hundred whateverth in the line.”
“Four hundred twenty-eighth.” Indrajit sighed. “Yes. My people are dwindling in number, and none of the youth has the aptitude or the inclination. But if the Epic dies, then it will be as if my people never existed. In a terrible and real sense, my people will never have existed. We will have made no difference, left no mark.”
“Grim.”
“I came to Kish looking for a way to avoid that. Some cousin people, some lost branch of my kin—the Epic hints at numerous such possibilities—some person interested in becoming adopted into the Blaatshi.”
“You could write it down,” Fix suggested.
“That would be strictly a last resort.”
“We need to find Ilsa,” Fix said. “If she’s in danger, and we can protect her—and I think both those things are probably the case—then we can still get paid.”
“Yes,” Indrajit agreed. “And also, we need to go talk to Frodilo Choot, and make her tell us her part in this. Did she want Ilsa killed? And why?”
“I’d like to interrogate Holy-Pot.”
“You suggesting necromancy?”
“No.”
“I’ve heard terrible things happen to necromancers,” Indrajit said. “Their flesh warps. They get boils, and their skin sloughs off. Something about the living can’t abide contact with the dead.”
“I’m not suggesting it,” Fix insisted. “I’m just wishing out loud.”
“Well, maybe we’ll be lucky. Ilsa had a double, who was dead.”
“Maybe,” Fix said. “Though maybe that’s something else entirely. Another big reason we need to find Ilsa.”
“Maybe Holy-Pot will turn out to have a double, and it will be the double who died.”
“Two Holy-Pots,” Fix said. “Four faces.”
“Frozen hells.” Indrajit spat, hoping in vain it would clear the reek of the sewer from his mouth and nostrils. “You don’t think Ilsa’s double has something to do with the Lord Chamberlain, do you?”
Fix considered this. “You mean, maybe Ilsa was dead from the beginning? And the person we were running around with was Orem Thrush, the Lord Chamberlain?”
“Well, when you say it out loud, it sounds crazy.”
“I wouldn’t have guessed the Lord Chamberlain could sing like that,” Fix said. “But what do I know?”
Chapter Sixteen
Indrajit woke while it was still dark, the damp chill of night clinging to his bones and his nostrils so thoroughly plugged with the stench of the latrine that he barely smelled it any longer. What had awakened him?
He heard a groan and saw a flickering light. For a moment, he prepared himself to slip sideways to avoid falling matter from above, but then he realized that the light was at his feet. No, not quite at his feet, but cracking now and then along the floor of the tight, slimy chamber.
A light was shining through the sewer pipe.
It could have been many things, including someone in the basement of an adjoining building, or a jobber working the sewers. But it could also have been some creature, glowing of its own power, creeping up from the lich-dusty Druvash levels to find a meal, so Indrajit jumped into action.
He elbowed Fix, and the short man was instantly awake. They pushed the dead Zalapting to one side so that the light wouldn’t touch him—in case anyone was also looking through the pipe—and then climbed out. Indrajit had the gray Handler’s tunic balled in one hand.
They crept from the alley. Indrajit’s muscles screamed as they slowly uncramped, and the wound in his leg stung him. Once he could see more than a fist’s width of stars overhead, Indrajit realized that he’d slept nearly a whole night leaning against the stone. He ached all over, including in his lungs. At the edge of the street, a coughing fit overtook him and Fix joined him in it. For three violent minutes, they hacked phlegm up and cast it onto the bricks of the Crown, and then Indrajit felt he could breathe again.
The air of the Crown wasn’t sweet, exactly—in the world’s oldest city, the only sweet air was in the gardens of the temples or the wealthy, or on high rooftops—but on top of the sweat of sleepers, the pall of coal fires, and the faint tang of latrines, Indrajit could smell early morning bread, scented toilet waters, and the sea.
“I need a bath,” he announced.
“We both do,” Fix agreed.
“I have no money left.”
“You are quick to spend.” Fix chuckled, a high-pitched, silvery sound. “No wonder you were in debt.”
“Get off your high horse, Fascicular,” Indrajit grunted.
Fix nodded. “All I’m saying is that I still have cash. Let’s discuss this in a steam bath.”
“And at first light, we go talk to Frodilo Choot.”
Indrajit kept the gray tunic, just in case. He walked with his face down and swinging his head from side to side, sweeping the streets around him with his wide-ranging vision. He saw two jobbers in green cloaks with spears—one looked like an ordinary Kishi and the other had cheeks and a jaw that glowed a bright blue, casting light in whichever direction he looked. Jobbers, patrolling the street at night, but they slowly walked away from Indrajit and Fix.
Indrajit didn’t see anyone following them.
Thoughts of the Spill reminded Indrajit of the jobbers in orange tunics who had destroyed Diaphernes’s office, so they went to a hot bath in the Dregs. The all-sexes common room was cheap, but Fix paid for the best room, a stone grotto six paces long, with a boiling spring at one end whose waters quickly cooled in a series of three small pools before flowing out a crack at the other end. Light came from a heap of blue luminescent stones beside the hot spring.
They piled their weapons in a corner.
Indrajit sat in the middle pool. He felt guilty about taking the warm water, but he needed it for his aches. His guilt disappeared when Fix plunked himself straight into the hottest pool, into heat Indrajit would have found intolerable.
They were alone.
“The first order of business,” Indrajit said, “is to raise the possibility that we should split up and leave Kish.”
“I’m not leaving Kish,” Fix said.
“Because you’re in love,” Indrajit said.
Fix nodded.
Fix hesitated. “Not exactly.”
“Oh ho, now we get to it. You killed someone for love. You’re in love with Holy-Pot’s sister. You romanced the wife of one of the great family lords.”
“I tried to start a business.”
“Frozen hells, you are disappointing. I thought we had tunneled to the exciting kernel of your soul, and now you’re telling me that for love, you were willing to do…an extremely boring thing.”
“I left the Selfless because I was in love. I wanted to become wealthy, so I could convince the woman to marry me. So useless knowledge, you see, would do me no good. And I was learning risk-merchantry from Holy-Pot so that eventually I could start my own shop as a risk-merchant.”
“You mean he was training you?”
“No, I mean I was working for him so I could learn to do what he does. You work hard with your eyes open, you can learn any business from any job in the business. In fact, I think there’s a big advantage to having worked in the lowest levels of the organization, which in this case is collections—”
“Stop.” Indrajit shook his head. “Holy-Pot wanted to kill you because you were going to become his competitor?”
“Well, maybe.” Fix dunked his face under the steaming water, and Indrajit flinched, half-expecting the shorter man to die from the heat. “But she was growing impatient.”
“Tell me who she is.”
Fix fell silent.
“Wait,” Indrajit said. “She does exist, right? This is a real woman you’re talking about?”
“She’s gone now,” Fix said. “So her identity hardly matters.”
Indrajit sensed he wasn’t going to learn any more on that subject for the moment. “Okay. She was growing impatient.”
“So I went ahead and started my risk-merchantry business,” Fix said. “Without being admitted to the Paper Sook first.”
Indrajit tried to process this information. “So, contracts not on the Registry.”
“Yes.”
“Illegal risk-merchantry.”
“Unregistered, yes.”
“Undercutting Holy-Pot and his friends. Otherwise, how would you get the business?”
“Yes,” Fix admitted. “Cheap, illegal risk-merchantry contracts.”
“How were you going to pay?” Indrajit asked. “I mean, if you had to pay a…what do you call it?”
“A claim. I took in as many contracts as I could, with as balanced a risk profile as possible.”
Indrajit shook his head. “Stop, I don’t understand that and I don’t want to. Are you saying you ended up in enormous debt to some ship captain or muleskinner chief?”
“No, I did okay in the risk-merchanting business. Made some money, in fact. She left anyway.”
“You didn’t make enough.”
Fix nodded.
“But you think Holy-Pot Diaphernes found out you were a risk-merchantry bandit, and wanted you dead for it.”
“I guess so.”
“So it was all about a woman. See, the lessons I learned from the Blaatshi Epic taught me to decipher you, young Fiximon.”
“Lucky guess.”
“But if you’ve got a risk-merchantry business going, why were you still taking jobs from Holy-Pot?”
“I can’t register my contracts,” Fix said. “But the business still takes place in and around the Paper Sook, and I needed a reason to be there.”
“You could leave Kish now,” Indrajit suggested. “Go take up risk-merchantry somewhere else. Boné or Xiba’alba or the Paper Sultanates.”
Fix shook his head. “She lives here. Besides, this is the biggest market. I don’t think those other places have enough room for an operator like me.”
Indrajit almost laughed out loud, but caught himself. “Frozen hells, you’re a black-books risk-merchant in unrequited love.”
“You could leave,” Fix shot back.
Could he? Indrajit thought about it. “No,” he said. “If I leave here, it’s to go home and die.”
“You couldn’t do something else? Just become a fisherman or something?”
Indrajit sighed. “My people are few in number. Three hundred, when I left. Our reproduction is…complicated. And our living space is getting squeezed. And none of the youth wants to make the mental effort and the life commitment required to master and perform thirty-thousand lines of poetry, with all the epithets and gestures and staging, as well as the tale itself. And none of them wants to take on a junior priest in turn, and compose an additional fifty or one hundred lines bringing the Epic down another generation.”
“So you came to Kish to find an apprentice.”
“It’s up to me.”
“But why Kish? Your people aren’t from here.”
“In every generation, there have been leavers. Some of them, or their descendants, must be here. Or if not, perhaps I can find some cousin-folk, some race of man that is our kin, that might be willing to make a home for the Epic. If they’re not here themselves, there must be news of them here. All things come to Kish.”
They sat briefly in silence.
“If we’re not going to leave,” Fix said, “then we have a problem.”
“If only we had our own jobber company,” Indrajit said, “we could fight our way out.”
“We do have our own jobber company,” Fix said. “It’s just a bit on the small side.”
That thought made Indrajit feel a little better. A little. “Well, if we can’t fight our way out, maybe we can…I don’t know, solve the puzzle?”
“What, you mean figure out who’s behind all this and turn them into the authorities?”
“Unless the guilty parties are the authorities,” Indrajit said. “Which I find depressingly possible. But maybe we could get proof, and hold it over the guilty parties’ heads. Make them leave us alone.”
“Or maybe, if we got to the bottom of all of this, we’d find there was a single person behind it. And if we just had to kill one person, we could do that.”
“I’d be up for killing one person,” Indrajit agreed. “If that person was a real bastard.”
“Whoever it is, he tried to kill us.”
“Or she.”
“Could be a she.”
“Could be Frodilo Choot. She hired the Handlers to kill Ilsa.”
“And she’s a man.”
“What?” Indrajit blinked in puzzled silence. “You’re saying that Ilsa’s magical power affected Choot, so maybe Choot’s not a woman.”
Fix shrugged. “Or she’s a woman who can be affected by Ilsa’s power. So apparently that’s a possibility.”
“You’re right,” Indrajit said. “Whoever did this, let’s kill him. Or her.”
He climbed out of the water and sat in the steam. Sweat beads sprang up on his mahogany-colored skin.
“There is no chance that all this activity is designed just to kill us,” Fix said. “We’re not worth hiring a single jobber company, much less two.”
“I make it four companies.” Indrajit laughed. “Gannon’s Handlers, the boys in the orange tunics—”
“Yes, those are the two I had in mind,” Fix agreed. “And I suppose you’re counting the jobbers Grit Wopal hired.”
“Let’s assume they still bear us some animosity, yes. And also Yashta Hossarian.”
Fix frowned. “Orange and black? Fellow with no arms, and legs like a bird’s?”
Indrajit nodded. “He and his crew are the ones who came for me and forced me to take this job.”
“Forced?”
“Okay, strongly encouraged. So one company hired by Holy-Pot, one by Orem Thrush—”
“We think.”
“We think, one by Thrush’s intelligence man, and one by Frodilo Choot. And the goal is not to kill us, but someone has to die or take the blame, and everyone knows in advance it’s going to be us. Or at least, Gannon’s Handlers know. We’re designated to take the fall.”
&n
bsp; “For killing Ilsa.”
“And to keep us from objecting, we’re supposed to die. Since Holy-Pot hired both of us, that tends to suggest he knew we’d take the fall. Could he have chosen us to take the fall?”
“Why? Because he thought I would be his competition in risk-merchantry?”
Not having a very good answer to the question, Indrajit shrugged. “Why a second body of…what is Ilsa’s race called?”
Fix shrugged.
“Maybe you can look her up in your fascicle,” Indrajit suggested. “Let’s call the dead one Ilsa Two. Assuming it is dead, and not hibernating or waiting to accept a soul or whatever.”
“Why Ilsa Two?”
“Right, good question. Also, doesn’t this seem like a lot of trouble to go to just because an opera singer wants to quit her job?”
Fix frowned. “You’re saying, there must be some stakes here we’re not seeing.”
“Yeah. Something that makes this all worth it.”
“But it seems clear that the plan is to kill Ilsa. And Holy-Pot is getting in the way, with his pesky jobbers Indrajit and Fix, so he has to die.”
“Maybe that’s not in the original plan. Maybe that just develops with the turn of events.” Indrajit chuckled. “That doesn’t bode especially well for the jobbers.”
“We have to go talk to Choot.”
Indrajit tried to think that through. “Choot knows that Thinkum Tosh took out the original contract, but we know that, too. Maybe Choot can tell us whether she thinks Orem Thrush was the real party behind the agreement.”
“Bearing in mind that Choot wants us dead. Also, Gannon’s Handlers seem to be in on the mystery here, don’t they?”
“They knew they were supposed to kill Ilsa and us. I’m not sure they know why. Maybe Gannon himself does.”
“Holy-Pot said they were hired by Choot. So I think she knows everything.”
“Mote Gannon is my backup plan. But wouldn’t you rather try to tease information out of an unarmed risk-merchant, who may or may not secretly be a man, than assault the captain of one of Kish’s larger jobber companies?”
“She did try to kill us.”
“They both did,” Indrajit said. “But the stakes have gone up for her, too. Whoever killed Holy-Pot Diaphernes might be after her as well.”