"We're looking for someone. Raxa Dosse of the Order of the Alley. Do you know her?"
"Do I know about the woman who pulled a heist on the Sealed Citadel itself? They're probably singing songs about her out front as we speak."
"Know where we can find her?"
Lanina knitted her brows. "I don't. And I'm glad I don't."
Blays folded his arms. "Bit of a terror, is she?"
"I've never heard so many rumors about one person. Some say she's a vampire—turns into a bat and flits into the place she wants to rob. Others say she can fly by flapping her arms. Or that she's got a blade that can cut through solid rock. I believe about one word in a hundred, but what I do believe is that she's got more bodies on her than that carneterium of yours."
"That's exactly why we need to find her," Dante said. "Do you know anyone who might know more?"
Lanina rolled her lips together. "There's a person named Thumbs that comes in here most nights. Around his fifth cup, he likes to brag about how he used to run with the Order. Normally, I'd say it was no more than drunk talk. A way to puff himself up for his fellow souses. But Thumbs seems to know just enough that I might believe him."
"Then we'll find out tonight."
"I'll consider myself warned. But if you plan to beat it out of him, do me a favor and do it outside."
"Think we'd need to? I thought he was a braggart."
"A most annoying one." Lanina met his gaze, but there was something guarded in her eyes. "Just don't be surprised if he suddenly acts like he'd rather swallow his own tongue."
She promised to send a runner to the Citadel if Thumbs arrived that evening. Dante and Blays moved on to their next potential source, a pawnbroker Blays sometimes went out drinking with. While Blays spoke with his man, Dante cycled through the eyes of the beetles that had arrived at the Order's known haunts. With no idea what Raxa looked like, he had to listen to each conversation carefully. Her name cropped up now and then, but always in the context of speculation or gossip, and never as though they were sitting there in the room with her.
The pawnbroker gave them nothing of note. Neither did their next three sources. Snow continued to fall. The night joined it. Nak looned Dante to let him know that Thumbs had arrived at the Stagger Home, "whatever any of that meant." Dante and Blays beelined for the pub.
Inside, Lanina commanded the bar. Seeing Dante, she shifted her eyes to the right end of the counter, where a man in a disintegrating fur hat jabbed his index finger in all directions, punctuating his loud speech. Soon enough, the man in the hat stood and walked outside to use the latrine.
Blays moved behind him, smiling. "Mr. Thumbs?"
Thumbs spun, jaw tight and head tipped back. Seeing the two armed men across from him, he eased back. "What do you want? To watch a grown man take a piss?"
"Better take care of that first. Otherwise, when you hear what I have to say, you'll wind up wearing it."
Thumbs scowled. There was a latrine around the rear of the building, but he turned his back on them and urinated into a snowbank. Dante knew that countless people did it every day—in moments of desperation or over-inebriation, he'd done so himself—but the sight of someone pissing on his city made him want to drag the man off to the dungeons.
Thumbs finished and walked back toward them, keeping his right hand in the pocket of his long coat. "Get on with it before someone steals my drink."
"The other night I heard you say you used to belong to the Order." Blays tipped his head to the side. "Is that true?"
"Damn right. One of their top men. Raked in so much silver I could retire by an age when most men are still learning their trade."
"Did you ever know…her? The shadow who calls the shots?"
"'Course I did. A man like me knows everyone." Thumbs smirked. "But if you're angling for an introduction, well, that means you don't got what it takes to deserve one."
"I think you'll tell me how to get in touch with her. You see, my name is Blays Buckler. I work in the employ of the Citadel. Or maybe it'd be more accurate to say that I've agreed to lend my talents to the Citadel because I'm fond of it and the people in it. In either event, I need to speak with Raxa Dosse. You can help me find her. Or I can give your friends reason to call you The Man with Two Weird Little Nubs Where His Thumbs Used to Be, and then you can help me find her."
Over the course of Blays' speech, Thumbs' face had frozen as fast as the ice in the streets. His right hand twitched in his pocket. Dante drew on the shadows.
Thumbs went perfectly still. "It was lies. All of it. I was never in the Order. Damn sure never knew Raxa Dosse."
"Then why pretend to be part of a vicious gang?" Blays said. "To avoid the horror of ever being hired again?"
"Why else? Make myself look important. Be the one everybody else looks up to."
"I think it's time to see about those thumbs."
The man edged back an inch. "You're mad at me because I don't associate with known criminals?"
"I've got nothing against criminals. Used to be one myself. Would probably still be considered one, except I became one of the people who gets to decide who the criminals are." Blays took a step forward, gazing down at the shorter man. "I'm getting mad at you because I think you're lying to me."
Thumbs whipped his hand from his pocket. A knife slashed past the falling snowflakes. Blays stepped to Thumbs' left, grabbing the collar of the man's coat and pulling it over his head. Thumbs yelled out, slashing blindly. Blays turned with him, yanking the coat inside-out over Thumbs' arms, ensnaring him. Blays grabbed his wrist, located an elbow within the fabric, and bore down with his forearm. The knife fell into the snow.
Blays made a few more maneuvers Dante probably wouldn't have been able to follow even in full daylight. He came to a stop standing over Thumbs, locked onto an arm that was in imminent danger of snapping.
"Right," Blays said. "Talk."
"I was in the Order." Thumbs sneered up at Blays, snot smeared across his upper lip. "But I left almost two years ago. I never knew Raxa. Don't know where to find her."
Blays cranked the man's arm another fraction of an inch. Thumbs gasped, then retched.
Blays shifted his grip. "You're sure about that?"
"Then take my arm, you jackbooted priest-lover. Even if I did know, telling you would write my name on a grave."
Blays looked up at Dante. "What do you think?"
"Can't hurt to try it." Dante nodded at the man's arm. "Except, obviously, for him."
"I just have this nasty suspicion he's telling the truth."
"Your call."
Blays tipped back his head to the falling flakes, swore, and let go of Thumbs' arm. The man plopped into the snow and sat up, rubbing his arm.
"Let this be a lesson about the dangers of vanity," Blays said.
Thumbs got to his feet. Blays picked up the knife from the snow and underhanded it to Thumbs without any spin. Thumbs tracked it and caught it with a cradling motion. He returned it to his pocket and crunched through the snow toward the pub.
Halfway to the corner of the building, he turned and glared at them, eyes icy-bright. "You call us thugs. Then you beat me. Threaten me. Every day, your soldiers do the same thing to people like me across the whole damn city. That's why we need someone like her. Who else is going to protect us?"
He turned and stamped around the corner. Empty-handed in a grungy alley that stank of urine, Dante headed back toward the distant lump of the Citadel.
"This is a bad idea," Blays said.
"To call it a night? We've been running down sources all day with nothing to show for it. I need a break."
"That's exactly what I mean. Everyone we've talked to has stonewalled us, lied to us, or passed us off to someone else. If we were anywhere else, we'd be able to make some progress. But we're trying to infiltrate the same underground that we're constantly arresting, imprisoning, and executing. Worst of all, we're trying to find the only one of them who can stand up to us. You really think they're
going to turn in Raxa Dosse, their folk hero? You might as well ask the slice of beef on your plate where to find its brother."
"Then we put our power to use. Raid all of the Order's hangouts. Imprison every one of their people until someone talks."
"Giving Raxa the motive and opportunity to light out with the book and your sword."
"What else are we supposed to do? Continue spying on the Order's minions who will probably never step foot in the same neighborhood that she's hiding in?"
Blays was quiet for a time, the snow squeaking underfoot as he hiked toward the Ingate. "We're overthinking this. Put out a reward."
"Think that'll be enough?"
"Even if everyone loves her, there's always someone desperate or selfish enough to betray what they believe in."
Dante tugged his hood forward to cover his freezing ears. "But that's what we're searching for right now. And you're claiming we won't find it. That they won't turn her in to the same authorities who rule them."
"We can't squeeze the answers out of them. That only makes them want to kick back."
"But we can coax them into doing what we want. Plant the seed of the idea and let them grow it."
"Precisely." Blays smiled suddenly. "Best if we're not even involved. Have whoever comes in to claim the reward speak to a monk, or someone outside the higher echelons of authority. If the squealer doesn't have to say it right to our faces, they can tell themselves they're not a snitch."
"You're getting more cynical as you get older."
"Hardly. I'm just better at understanding what I'm seeing."
As always, the forging of a new plan bolstered Dante's spirits. Yet something chewed at him. Were they missing a key detail? Some flaw in the plan? He glanced at Blays, about to voice his unease. Blays was staring down the street with a look of such blankness Dante could have believed his soul had departed for the Pastlands.
With that image in his mind, he knew the source of his own troubled thinking. Blays' plot, while cunning, didn't feel like Blays. At this point in life, Blays had seen too much to be naive, but through it all, he'd always maintained a certain optimism. That by and large, people were good, and worth sparing.
This felt colder. The careless knife of truth that cuts as deep as the sea. Blays seemed to be expressing the belief that everyone was as cracked and broken as Arawn's Mill. Inherently flawed. And his solution to their problem carried the implied belief that these flaws weren't necessarily a bad thing: because if you accepted the basic meanness of humans, then that granted you the power to exploit them.
Dante stepped over a long lump in the snow. The lump was covered in fabric; it was the arm of a beggar who'd frozen to death and been buried in the drifts. What had brought this change on Blays? The genocide in Collen? The Keeper betraying their faith in her? Or were they simply getting old?
Whatever the case, Dante had always suspected these darker truths himself. Lighthearted even when he was being cynical, Blays had always held him back from stepping into that drop of unknown distance.
A bitter wind howled from the north, driving powdery snow before it. It was snowing harder now, in slanted, irregular gusts that made the buildings look as though they were fading away into another world. Like the turning of a page, or the clicking of a gear, Dante's mind shifted, too.
And he didn't think he liked what he saw.
~
In the end, it took just two days for someone to collect the reward.
The someone in question was a young and angry-looking man who refused to give his name. They'd had any number of false reports from drunks and saboteurs, but there was a spiteful intensity in the young man's words that made Dante all but certain he was telling the truth about Dosse.
According to him, Raxa Dosse was operating out of the upper floor of a tenement deep inside a part of the city where a respectable person would in fact be caught dead, but only because someone there had killed them and used their body as a bridge over the nearest puddle.
The monk handling the conversation thanked the young man and made arrangements to pay him if his information led to anything useful. The tenement was only two blocks away from a pub where one of Dante's darkling beetles was currently crawling around on the ceiling spying on the overly loud blather of the crooks beneath it. He guided the beetle outside and directed it toward the tenement. On the way, the fierce winds knocked it down half a dozen times.
They had the shutters closed against the storm. Dante landed the beetle on a windowsill and directed it to search for a crack. This process took several minutes—apparently they'd weatherproofed the upper floor for their princess of thieves—but he finally wiggled his way inside.
He was in a dim room with four pallets on the floor. He crawled to the ceiling and out the door into a common room. There, two men sat at a table playing dice. They'd put a cloth over the table so their rolls wouldn't rattle. They had scarred arms and faces and the unnaturally calm look of enforcers. A third man stood beside the door to the hallway, hand resting on the hilt of his sheathed dagger.
Other than the beeswax candles burning on counters and shelves, there was nothing in the way of luxury. Just places to sit and places to sleep. It could be abandoned as quickly as they could get out the door.
In a back room, a severe-looking woman sat at a writing desk reading a book. Her gray-streaked hair was bunned behind her head and she was frowning vaguely. She looked to be about forty; for some reason, Dante had thought she'd be younger.
The woman was probably Raxa, but he needed confirmation before he did anything crazy. While he waited for her to talk to someone, he brought two more beetles in from elsewhere in the city, using them to explore the apartments. They found no sign of the book or the sword.
Wonderful. They were going to have to take her alive, then.
As he was angling for a closer look at the book the woman was reading, curious about whatever she was so interested in, someone knocked on the door in a complicated code. The guard standing inside the door knocked back and was answered with another code. Satisfied, the guard opened the door, allowing in a burly man with a dense beard and a young woman with wide-spaced eyes and shiny black hair that hung to her shoulders.
They hung up their long coats and headed for the back room. The big man leaned his head through the doorway. "Raxa? Ready to report in."
The severe-looking woman continued to read for another few seconds, then marked her place and closed the book. "Enter."
He obliged, followed by the other woman. He clasped his hands in front of his waist. "They're ready to meet. Practically starving for it. They want to see you this same night."
Raxa nearly smiled. "Where?"
"There's a stable on Alloden Street. Next to the old temple, the one that got smashed up in the war."
"They want to meet at a stable? Why?"
The man's bearded cheek twitched. "They didn't say. Guessing they own the place. One o'clock."
She thought for a moment, then nodded. "Tell them I agree."
The burly man bobbed his head and left, accompanied by the younger woman.
Dante watched for a few minutes more, then withdrew his attention to his room in the Citadel. "Got her. Right where the source said she'd be."
"About time," Blays said. "What's the plan, then? You tear off the roof in a god-like surge of power while I rappel in and snatch her up? Or would you prefer something more subtle—a nethermancer on every rooftop backed up by a full cavalry charge down the street?"
"She's on her way to a meet in less than an hour. There's no need to complicate this. We ambush her in the streets and take her back here."
"And if she takes her guards along with her?"
Dante shrugged. "I won't cry if the dawn shines on a city with four fewer cutthroats in it. Going to have to hoof it if we want to catch her before the meet."
They were still dressed in their common garb. They grabbed their knee-length coats and headed outside, pulling their hoods tight over their heads. G
ant intercepted them at the gates, looking perturbed. Dante told him they were on their way to secure the book and they'd be back before the four o'clock bells. Gant nodded and made for the keep.
Jogging through the gates, Dante glanced back at the Citadel. "This was a lot simpler before I had to tell everyone who I'm off to kill."
"Time to implement a new rule," Blays said. "If anyone asks, you'll kill them."
In this weather, horses would be more trouble than they were worth, leaving them to jog toward Alloden Street. Dante knew it couldn't be so, but their choice to meet next to the damaged temple felt like a personal affront—he'd been meaning to patch the place up for years, but there had been so many other projects to attend to that it had slipped through the cracks.
"So," Dante said. "Ideas for how to take down a shadowalker?"
"Don't tell me you've never thought about how you'd fight me."
"I'd keep twenty feet away from you at all times, force you out of the shadows whenever you try to dive into them, then blast you into a pile of pulp topped by floppy blond hair. Unfortunately for that plan, we can't kill her. Not until we've got the book."
"She'll try to bolt." Blays wiped half-melted snow from his cheeks. "Don't think I've ever fought anyone in the shadows before. Think you'll be able to keep track of where she is?"
"Not sure." Dante grinned. "But I won't have to. You can follow her in the shadows. Wherever she goes, you point her out to me and I'll force her back out. We can keep that up until she runs out of strength."
"Assuming I can spend longer in the shadows than she can."
"Hopefully, I'll be able to lock her down tight and we can just carry her back to the Citadel."
"In this snow? New plan: you do the carrying while I scout ahead."
The larger avenues had pathways tunneled through the snow, but in many of the smaller streets, the drifts ranged up to their waists. Annoying. Then again, it would limit the routes Raxa could take to the meet.
Movement in the tenement. Dante switched to the beetle's vision. "They're leaving. Just her and the big guy."
The Cycle of Galand Box Set Page 108
