by D. J. Butler
“Except that it was most likely Gannon’s men, and they most likely killed Holy-Pot at her instruction.”
“Right. So we’ll go armed.”
“As an alternative,” Fix said, “what if we found Ilsa without Peer and put some of these questions to her?”
“We did put some of them to her.” Indrajit stretched his memory back. “She suggested it might be the opera company trying to kill her, or Orem Thrush.”
“Thrush still seems likely,” Fix said.
“Yeah,” Indrajit agreed. “I don’t think we can discount either one. Well, if Choot is in on this, it’s probably because someone hired her, and the Lord Chamberlain is a good guess. But in any case, I have no idea where to find Ilsa, so for now, that’s off the table.”
“We could dig into the opera house more.”
That was true. Indrajit took up two strigils lying within arm’s reach of the water and handed one to Fix. He began scraping sweat and filth from his body, wiping it onto a white linen towel provided for the purpose. “Okay, you’re right. And if they’re innocent, maybe they know where to find Ilsa.”
Fix climbed out of the water and began to strigil sweat from his limbs. “You mean maybe they have her address written down?”
“No, you literate bastard, I mean maybe we can shake her address out of one of the clerks. But if Ilsa was right, and they’re not innocent, then going to ask them questions might just get us into deeper trouble.”
“Of course, we think Frodilo Choot is in on the crime, and we’re going to try to get information out of her.”
“It’s an interesting question,” Indrajit said, “what Choot gets out of killing Ilsa. Choot would have to pay if Ilsa died, right?”
“We think so.”
“Maybe we should see a copy of that contract.”
“You mean read it?”
“Don’t rub it in. But yes, make sure Choot actually was supposed to pay out if Ilsa died. And if so, then Choot being in on a conspiracy to kill Ilsa means that probably it would make her more money than she would have to pay out.”
“So possibly Choot is innocent, and Mote Gannon is the crook.”
Indrajit rubbed his temples. “This makes my head hurt.”
“Maybe we’re not cut out to run a jobber company.”
“No,” Indrajit said. “Just add it to the list. Talk to Frodilo Choot, interrogate the management of the Palace of Shadow and Joy, put questions to Mote Gannon. Anyone else?”
“Tie Orem Thrush up and grill him. Punch Grit Wopal in the third eye some more. My turn, this time. Get a necromancer and ask Holy-Pot Diaphernes who killed him. And whether his name is really Holibot.”
“Find Ilsa without Peer.”
“Yes,” Fix agreed. “Finding Ilsa would be useful.”
“What about Ilsa Two?”
“I’m pretty sure she’s dead,” Fix said. “Are you thinking about a necromancer again?”
“Maybe,” Indrajit mused. “But maybe it would help to learn more about Ilsa’s race. Ilsa said they were all killed when she was a child, but then we found a second.”
“You’re making a lot of assumptions there.”
“I know. But maybe someone in the Hall of Guesses can help us replace those assumptions with good information. Or if not the Hall of Guesses, is it possible that one of the Selfless of Salish-Bozar the White might help us?”
“You think maybe facts about a nearly extinct race of man might qualify as useless information, and there might be a disciple of the White God who can tell us about Ilsa?”
“Maybe they can tell us whether the race really is extinct. And whether they store extra bodies to transmigrate into, or stuff their dead into trunks. And it doesn’t have to be a Selfless, right? Maybe in the process of qualifying a Selfless, the disciples of the White have debated this information. Maybe to prove the information useful, someone has had to master it.”
Fix chuckled. “You are thinking like a Selfless, Recital Thane.”
“Not I, Godless Outlaw Risk-Merchant. I’m thinking like a jobber.”
“Like a jobber captain, maybe.”
Indrajit grinned.
“Of course,” Fix continued, “if some Selfless has mastered all the information about Ilsa’s race, and we go get her to tell it to us, she will learn that the knowledge has use. And she will thereupon have to surrender her status as a Selfless. We will have defrocked a priest.”
“That thought should please you.”
“It does.”
Indrajit took a deep breath, letting the steam clean his lungs. “Well, let’s go see what we can learn from Frodilo Choot. I’m not putting my old kilt back on after getting this clean, so either we find new clothes, or I go naked.”
Chapter Seventeen
“Will she remember us?” Indrajit asked. “Or…he?”
They stood in the walled-in lane in front of Frodilo Choot’s shop. Men with orange tunics still watched from corners throughout the Paper Sook and surrounding streets; their arrangement looked casual to the uninformed glance, but Indrajit noticed that, wherever they went in the tangled streets around the sook, there was an orange-clad jobber watching. The jobbers didn’t interfere with him and Fix, so he guessed they must be set to watch for Ilsa, or Holy-Pot, or both.
The bathhouse had sold them new kilts and sleeveless tunics. Indrajit’s weapons and the few objects in his kilt pocket still smelled faintly of the latrine—the gray tunic worst of all—but the scent was fading, and he could ignore it.
“You mean, because when we met her, she was under Ilsa’s influence?”
“You can say spell. And yes.”
“But you were under Ilsa’s spell, and so was I,” Fix reminded him. “Did you fail to remember the time while she was dominating you?”
“No, you’re right,” Indrajit agreed. “Too bad. I think I’d rather she not remember us than that she remember us and think of us as part of the group that enchanted her.”
“She seems to want us dead. She’ll remember who we are.”
“Oh, right.” Indrajit tightened his grip on the hilt of his leaf-bladed sword.
“That Pelthite in orange is starting to wonder why you haven’t knocked,” Fix said. “Do it.”
Indrajit knocked.
The door opened immediately, and behind it stood the same doorman: bulky, purple, shimmering, and covered with scales. A bit of his face wriggled, possibly indicating the presence of eyes that were very tiny or nearly shut, and he snorted. Then he backed away, letting the two jobbers in.
They entered cautiously. Indrajit looked into the corners of the room for any indications of a trap or an ambush, and saw none.
Frodilo Choot hunkered behind her work counter. Through the bands of green tooled leather, she stared hostility in their direction. “I should summon the watch,” she hissed.
“We haven’t done anything,” Indrajit objected.
“You and Holy-Pot brought that witch in here. And you brought down Orem Thrush’s jobbers, who haven’t stopped staring at my door.”
“Maybe we should leave by the basement door, then,” Fix said. “Just in case.”
“Absolutely not.” Choot frowned. “Nor will you stay here long, or I will turn you in to the watch.”
Indrajit was pleasantly surprised that the risk-merchant hadn’t already attacked them. “We’re on your side.” He spread his arms.
“Which side is that?” she asked, ice in her voice.
He watched her eyes closely for any flinching as he spoke. “You bought risk on the life of Ilsa without Peer. You want to keep her alive. So do we.”
Frodilo Choot’s icy stare didn’t falter. “In that case, I have bad news for you. Our side has lost.”
“We have…? But…” Indrajit thought of Ilsa Two, and caught himself. “What do you mean?”
“I mean that last night, not too long after you were here, she was found dead at the Palace of Shadow and Joy.” The risk-merchant seemed genuinely upset.
“Found dead…how?” Indrajit asked.
“Cause of death undetermined.” The risk-merchant glowered. “Perhaps from a fall. Witnesses say she was found onstage, or backstage.”
Indrajit caught Fix’s gaze and they both nodded.
Then Indrajit sighed. “This is going to sound strange, but what if she wasn’t dead?”
The doorman hit Indrajit from behind. It was a solid blow and it caught Indrajit by surprise, right at the base of the skull. Indrajit struck the wooden counter with his forehead and bounced backward. Light flashed in his eyes and he sank to his knees.
He had the dim awareness of Fix putting up a better fight, but only slightly. The shorter man’s spear and falchion both failed to penetrate the doorman’s scales and then the doorman ripped the weapons away and choked Fix until he fell limp.
Indrajit raised a hand to protest, and Frodilo Choot kicked him in the jaw.
Time passed.
Indrajit was dragged somewhere. He hurt. The lights grew dimmer, and that was an improvement.
Was he dying?
Then his hands were tied together, and then his ankles.
He was hung on a hook, rough rope suddenly digging into his wrists with all the weight of his body.
Water splashed him in the face, and then again, and then a third time—
“I’m awake!” he spluttered, coughing and spitting out cold water.
“I will not be bullied,” Frodilo Choot growled.
“What?”
Fix also made a groggy sound. He was somewhere to Indrajit’s left; the room was shadowed and Indrajit’s vision was still shaky.
“I will not be blackmailed or threatened.” Choot’s face swooped in close to Indrajit’s own; he saw eyes opened wide, banded in green leather, and he smelled a cloying perfume.
“First of all,” Indrajit said, shaking from the chill of the water, “we didn’t control your mind. Before. That wasn’t us.”
“Ilsa,” Fix groaned.
“Yeah, that was Ilsa. She has a…power.” He didn’t say over men.
“Where is she?” Choot snapped. “What have you done with her?”
Fix chuckled, a weak, strangled sound. “On your list of people who want us dead, Twang, I guess we can put Frodilo Choot at the top.”
The purple doorman lunged from the darkness to punch Fix again. He cried out and fell silent.
“You’ve got this all wrong,” Indrajit said.
The purple doorman hit him in the stomach. He grunted, swung with the force of the blow, and then rocked back and forth slowly, trying to suck in air around the sudden painful knot in his gut.
“Okay,” Indrajit said. “Tell us what you want.”
“Where is Ilsa?” Choot asked.
Indrajit shook his head. “We don’t know. We don’t have her.”
“Get the knife,” Choot said.
“No, really,” Indrajit sputtered. “We were hired by Holy-Pot to protect her.”
Indrajit’s vision had returned enough for him to see that he and Fix hung from a horizontal pole fixed between two walls in an otherwise bare room. Light came in from a high, narrow window. “And you kidnapped her instead,” Choot suggested, “and you want me to ransom her from you, because otherwise I have to pay out under the contract.”
The doorman handed Choot a knife. It was long and triangular in shape, almost a short sword.
“No,” Indrajit tried again, “we got separated from her. Someone is trying to pin the blame on us for her death, and maybe kill us, and we’re trying to figure out who. You seemed like an obvious candidate.”
“You think I would kill a person whose risk I had bought?” Choot growled. “You think I would commit fraud?”
“It seems like a ridiculous thought now,” Indrajit said.
“Tell me where you’re keeping Ilsa without Peer.” Choot stabbed him in the thigh.
Fix screamed.
That didn’t seem right. No, it wasn’t Fix screaming, it was Indrajit.
“We don’t have her!” he shrieked.
“Who’s the beneficiary?” Fix yelled.
The knife poised ready to stab again, Choot hesitated. “What?”
“Who gets paid out under the risk-selling agreement?”
“Frozen hells,” Indrajit groaned. “You couldn’t say that earlier?” He saw his own blood spatter the floor.
“Who are you?” Choot asked Fix.
Fix was slow to answer. “I’m just a jobber,” he finally said. “Holy-Pot explained to me how some of the contracts work.”
“Old Two-Face would never do any such thing.” Choot pressed the tip of her blade against Fix’s sternum.
Despite his pain and giddiness, Indrajit chuckled. “Old Two-Face. That’s good. Why didn’t I think of that?”
“Because it’s not one of your epithets,” Fix muttered. “You’re not a poet. You’re not really a wordsmith at all, you’ve just memorized all the epithets and you lay them together to tell the same story, over and over again.”
“I could make a new epithet,” Indrajit said.
“You can?” Fix sounded skeptical.
“Yes. In fact, I will, just to show you.”
“Two-Face would never have taught you anything. He was as stingy with information as he was with money. So I’d better hear a convincing explanation of who you are and what you’re doing here in the next twenty seconds, or I’ll kill you both.”
“I’m a jobber,” Fix said immediately. “No company, just solo work. And it doesn’t pay much, but I picked up enough about risk-merchantry on the job to underwrite a few off-registry contracts, myself.”
“Foolish,” Choot hissed. “But bold.”
“Indrajit and I were hired by Holy-Pot to guard Ilsa, because Holy-Pot had repurchased some of the risk. We think from you. Someone has tried to kill her, but as far as we know, she’s still alive. Someone has also tried to set me and Indrajit up to take the blame for her murder—Old Two-Face seems to have had it in for us, but he can’t have done all this alone. We’re trying to figure out who might be behind all this plot, so we thought you might be able to tell us who the beneficiary is under the risk-selling contract.”
“Unless, of course,” Indrajit said, “you’re the one who wanted Ilsa dead. In which case, I guess Fiximon and I are doomed.”
Choot backed away a step, looking at them both.
“You do think someone is trying to commit fraud,” she said.
“We were told Thinkum Tosh took out the contract,” Indrajit said. His head tingled. The pool of his blood on the ground was disturbingly large. “But we were wondering if maybe the benefactor—”
“Beneficiary,” Fix said.
“—beneficiary might be Orem Thrush.”
“You think Orem Thrush set you up,” Choot said.
“Someone did.” Indrajit felt woozy. “The Lord Chamberlain is definitely interested in the situation. We think he’s the one who has jobbers watching the Paper Sook.”
“Cut them down,” Choot said to the doorman. “Bandage his leg.”
Indrajit hit the floor hard. Then another period of time passed during which he faded in and out of consciousness. He was moved to a reclining couch, such as something you might sit on at a fancy dinner party. The purple-scaled man bandaged his leg. When his vision finally recovered, Indrajit was sitting up, a warm and fragrant cup clutched in his hands.
“Is this coffee?” He took a sip. “Or rum?”
“Both.” Choot and Fix and Indrajit each sat on a reclining couch, smiling at each other, like characters in some surreal and comical street bawdy. “It’ll get you back on your feet.”
Indrajit couldn’t quite bring himself to say thank you, so he just sipped the hot drink. It didn’t heal his leg wound or make his head stop spinning, but it felt good going down.
“I think we can work together,” Choot said.
It would be nice to get paid again. Indrajit nodded. “Good.”
“If you bring me Ilsa al
ive,” the risk-merchant said, “or proof that she’s still alive, I’ll pay you fifty Imperials.”
“Five hundred,” Fix said.
The risk-merchant stared at the short jobber, but said nothing.
“Someone has already made a claim,” Fix said. “Otherwise, you wouldn’t be worried about this. And the policy has to be for thousands of Imperials.”
“I could just turn you in to the Paper Sook instead,” Choot pointed out.
Fix nodded. “And you could hire other jobbers to look for Ilsa. But those jobbers wouldn’t know what we know, and wouldn’t have the principals of the scam job—”
“If there is a scam job,” Choot muttered.
“—looking for them.”
“Three hundred Imperials,” Choot said.
“Four hundred,” Indrajit said, cutting in, “and you agree to…be our risk-merchant when we…incorporize…our jobber company.”
Fix looked at him, nodded slowly, and grinned. “Underwrite our bond.”
“Agreed.” Frodilo Choot’s voice was sour. “Yes, a claim has been made this morning.”
“Doesn’t the claimant have to prove Ilsa’s death to be able to collect?” Fix asked.
“I received an affidavit this morning from a notary’s office. Three witness statements, and I saw the body myself.”
“Who were the witnesses?” Indrajit asked.
“The director of the Palace of Shadow and Joy and two actors all testified to finding her body.”
“Not to seeing her death?” Indrajit pressed.
Choot shrugged. “It doesn’t matter whether anyone saw her die. If she’s dead, under the contract, I pay.”
Indrajit wanted time to discuss alone with Fix. Frodilo Choot, it seemed to him, was a victim. Her money was being taken. But Gannon’s Handlers, on the other hand…
“What made you hire Mote Gannon?” he asked.
“I needed a jobber company that knew the Palace,” she said. “They worked security there last year when that Xiba’albi princess was visiting, and Holy-Pot recommended them.”
“Holy-Pot recommended Mote Gannon?” Fix asked.
Choot shrugged and looked away. “Yes. But Gannon’s got a track record, he’s bonded. He was…acceptable.”
“Did Holy-Pot also bring you the contract?” Indrajit asked.