Zeddig left her there in the glow of the blade.
Chapter Twenty-nine
KAI LED HER TAIL through a night carnival in the Wings.
Jugglers spun fire poi, acrobats balanced on chairs balanced on plates balanced on brooms balanced on rubber balls, singers performed arias from operas Kai had never heard, and people milled, drinking beer from absurdly tall glasses, eating fried squid out of paper cones. (Kai wondered if that was some sort of political protest.) Four middle-aged women cheered as the acrobat bent atop her precarious column, shifted weight, and lifted her feet from the serving tray, uncurling to a perfect handstand; the acrobat canted to one side, unsteady—and lifted one hand from the handstand, propped on her fingertips above a tilting world. Kai thought the audience might topple her with the force of their applause. Drummers drummed and people laughed and barkers barked.
And Kai was being followed.
Her shadow was a large man, square-jawed and clad in grays that might have been blues or greens. He wore a hat, and he had the kind of arms that required work or Crafty augmentation to maintain. He never looked at her directly. Whenever Kai looked back, he was always turning to some new distraction: bare skin, fire, ice cream. She rarely saw him approach her. By the time she had found him in a crowd, he’d already changed direction, or stopped. But he kept a constant distance, and never let her leave his sight.
She’d first noticed him on an empty street outside Hala’s Fell. He ambled a block back, chewing gristle from a lamb skewer. She’d walked faster, and he let her draw ahead. She cut into the Wings, through a bar street with a name she didn’t yet know, and thought she lost him, but there he was, in the crowd—waving, apparently, to a friend who did not wave back.
He had to have noticed her noticing him, but he made no move to close the distance, which Kai doubted meant anything good. The shadow was playing her. He planned for her to make him.
Tail, shadow, make. She knew those spy words because she’d read about people who knew how to handle this sort of thing, who clumped problems like this into jargon the way Kai sorted different gods by type. Using those words, Kai engaged in a bit of magical thinking—as if knowing the right word would make her the spy she had to be to get out of this mess.
Oh, hells. She just had to lose someone in a crowd. How hard could that be? This man might be a professional, but even professionals screwed up. So: she cut a hard left into a bar, ducked under a waiter’s raised tray of drinks, pushed between too-close tables, accidentally elbowed a young man who seemed to be in mid–marriage proposal in the temple, made an apologetic face at the samite-clad singer onstage, and pushed out the serving exit into a narrow, fish-stinking, and grossly puddled back alley parallel to the carnival’s main drag. So far, so good. She just had to double back, get behind her tail, then cut downslope—the tail would assume she was heading in the same direction, run to outpace her, and realize too late that she’d taken another path. She’d handled worse.
She ran (cursing her heels, which were the practical sort, but every time she ran in them she felt like some mystery play gangster’s moll) past leaking garbage bins and shop doors toward the burst of color, light, incense, and (as a fire-eater exhaled) flame at the alley’s mouth.
A man in silhouette stepped out to block her path.
He was too broad, too short, for her tail.
Of course, she reflected, one man could only do so much. If someone wanted to tail her so she stayed tailed, they probably wouldn’t use only one man, who, in retrospect, had obviously let her see him.
Fuck.
She turned, and ran into a man behind her. Tall, with a narrow-brimmed cap. “Ma’am, you look lost.” An accent more mainland Iskari than Talbeg.
“I’m not,” she said.
“We can help you.” The big man behind her approached. He had forearms about the size of Kai’s neck, and the way he moved told her a great deal, including that he held a thin metal pipe flush against his arm, which he didn’t want her to see.
Okay. Just another big night in the hard city. Hard night in the big city? Whatever. She shifted so her back was to the wall, and used the voice she’d use on a dog that kept jumping up. “No. Thank you. I’m leaving.” And she sidled along the wall, thinking, this was a shit idea, and, they’re awfully professional for crooks, and, don’t move until the big guy shifts his weight.
Which he did, to his back foot, before he swung at her with the pipe. She sidled into the swing, caught his wrist on her arm, hit him in the throat with the blade of her hand, and ran when he staggered back, thinking, self-defense classes, worth it, stupid pilgrims who pray to idols of martial prowess, worth it, I’ll send wine later. Narrow-brim snagged her purse strap; she let the purse slide off over her arm, and he stumbled. A few more feet to the alley, and—
Someone stepped into the alley mouth.
Then it all went black.
Unconsciousness, she thought at first, then realized (thanks, adrenaline) that you probably couldn’t think when you were unconscious. This was the darkness of closed eyes in a black room and darker, darkness with texture, darkness of a lover’s hand over your face, and she heard cries and curses and ran, somehow finding her footing despite the gross slick pavement and the absent light. She did not know the way, yet, running in the dark, she did not trip, did not strike a garbage bin or a wall.
She burst from the inky black into carnival firelight and noise, and kept running. People moved aside, and she ran past them into the blue-tinged night.
A woman shouted, “Hey, wait!” but she did not slow down. She ran from the carnival to the teeming Iskari boulevards, crossed the road with a pack of revelers, and stopped, breathing hard, cursing seventy-seven gods and as many hells, at a trolley stop. An old Talbeg man glanced at her and shrugged, and returned to his comic book.
“Lady,” said a voice nearby, a voice she recognized—“you run fast in those heels.”
She should have placed the voice back at the carnival, but she had never expected to hear it in Agdel Lex, awake. Hearing it now, as the trolley bells approached and the few stars burned overhead, she felt as if the record of her life had skipped, its needle darting to an unexpected song.
But there Izza stood, on the Regency Boulevard sidewalk, wearing tan slacks and sandals and a loose white hooded tunic, Kai’s purse over her shoulder. She looked young and happy, flush with a run that hadn’t winded her nearly as much as it winded Kai. “I thought I’d save you a trip to the purse shop.”
Kai wanted to hug her, and scream, and cry, but she started with: “What the hells are you doing here?”
“You need help,” Izza said, and plopped beside her on the bench. “And friends don’t wait for friends to ask.”
Chapter Thirty
KAI SHUT HER HOTEL room door and tried and failed, again, to wrap her mind around the situation. Izza pirouetted through the hotel room, touching dresser and walls and sheets and drapes. “Kitty!” She tried to scoop up Behemoth, who hissed and launched himself from Izza’s arms to the floor, to a chair, to the dresser, to the top of the squid-and-torch idol there. Izza reached for the cat again. Behemoth swiped at her. “Some place you’ve got here.”
Kai picked up the pieces in her mind: Izza’s presence, her attack in the alley, Aman, Zeddig, Ley. Okay, her plans were in shambles. Make new plans. She marched to the bathroom, poured herself a glass of water from the tap, drank the water, poured a second, drank that. Almost better. “You need to leave.”
“I just got here.” The cat hissed. Izza was shadow-boxing with him, sliding her hand through the clawed perimeter to tap Behemoth on the head before the cat could scratch her. She won twice for each exchange she lost. “You need my help.”
“The alley situation could have gone better,” Kai admitted.
“You don’t even know what happened back there.”
“Some thugs tried to jump me. I look like a tourist.”
Izza worried her lower lip between her teeth, and stared into Behem
oth’s eyes. She stilled into the faraway focus she had when praying: the world might fall away piece by piece unnoticed, until at last the thing on which she’d fixed herself fell too and left Izza drifting in empty space, staring into nothing at all.
Her hand slipped out, faster than Kai could follow, and tapped Behemoth on the forehead. “Boop!” The cat snatched for Izza’s hand, but lost his balance and ended up in a corkscrew sideways roll to the floor. “There was a Wrecker Lieutenant around the corner with a few of those squid boys, waiting to ride to the rescue. Suit pressed, armor spic-and-span. She’d have made an impression, saving you. I almost wanted to watch.”
“You’re saying it was a setup?” Kai set down the glass. Her hands were wet. Was she shaking when she poured the water? She dried herself with a towel.
The cat tried to swipe Izza, but Izza drew out of reach.
“Describe the Lieutenant,” Kai said.
“Short, dark hair, square jaw, scars here and here. Iskari.”
“Bescond. She was trying to warn me off the investigation.”
“She wanted to give you the works. You shouldn’t be out after dark, miss. Not alone. Foreigners come to bad ends in Agdel Lex if they’re not careful.” Izza made a pitch-perfect mockery of the Iskari accent. “They wouldn’t have let their men in the alley rough you up much, but us priestesses have to watch out for one another.”
“You have to leave.”
“Excuse me?” Izza leaned back against the dresser, and crossed her arms. “You barely know this city. The Wreckers are after you. You keep poking around and they’ll stop trying to scare you.”
This was the bit where Kai was supposed to say, that doesn’t sound too bad, and Izza would reply, they’ll stop scaring you because they’ll start hurting you. Kai didn’t want to fight that battle. She didn’t want to fight anything. She wasn’t in this to stop the Iskari, she didn’t want revolution. Her sister was in trouble. Zeddig had told her to get lost. So had Ley. Maybe she should. But when she thought about leaving, she saw a girl by the seashore as the tide rolled in, holding a city in her mind until pain broke her and she fell. “I know what you think.”
Izza raised one eyebrow.
“That I don’t understand the danger. I believe the Iskari won’t hurt a Kavekanese priestess, I don’t know how easy it would be for me to disappear in some back alley—how many people disappear in Agdel Lex every day. I know.” She looked up through loose strands of hair. “I got locked in a Penitent last time I tried something like this. That won’t happen again.”
Behemoth had steadied himself on the idol and turned, crouched to pounce, eyeing the back of Izza’s head with the same predatory expression Izza had fixed on him earlier. Kai thought about warning Izza, and decided against it.
“Fine,” Izza said. “But you still need my help.”
The tail twitched. “Why?”
“Your sister’s gone underground with Zeddig. The Iskari know you’re looking for her. Bescond could stop you—or follow you, wait until you find her, and snatch her first. You need someone on your side who isn’t a known quantity. Someone who has enough cred to figure out what your sister’s planning, while you use your status with the Iskari to find a way to get her out of trouble.”
Behemoth’s nose wrinkled. His tail stilled.
“I can’t let you do that,” Kai said, as Behemoth pounced.
But instead of sinking claws into Izza’s skull, the cat landed on her shoulder, slithered down into her waiting arms, and curled there, purring. Izza stroked him as if she hadn’t noticed the change. The cat, now uninterested, poured from her arms to the floor.
“Why?”
You’re a kid, was the wrong thing to say. Izza had saved Kai from the Penitents—sort of—and lived here when she was ten. She could handle herself. “The congregation back home isn’t strong enough without us yet. We can’t risk you on something this . . .” It hurt more than she wanted to admit to say, “Inconsequential.”
Izza walked to Kai. She, and the kids with which she’d grown, darting down Kavekanese back streets, stealing, telling tales, moved like no one else Kai knew. They walked as if the world might give way at any time—their steps that light, their bodies that tense, their eyes that open. Izza had the purpose of an arrow.
She reached for Kai’s hands. Kai looked down. Unthinking, she had curled her hand towel into a rope, and started strangling the rope. Izza’s fingers, callused, thin, strong, slid into the knot of Kai’s grip, and Kai had to choose—her hands had to choose—between fighting Izza and letting go.
She let go.
Izza held the towel rope, and Kai held Izza’s hands.
“The Lady,” Izza said, slowly, still so unused to talking about goddesses and gods, “is bigger than that. Because She has to be, and so do we. If we’re not, we’re lost.”
But we are lost, Izza. You don’t know that yet. We cast about in the darkness, drowning offshore, like Dad, and we can’t count on any rope, we can’t count on each other, because we’re all in the ocean together. You can only rescue a drowning woman from safety, and nowhere’s safe. You’ve lived harder, but I’ve lived longer. I’ve seen people reach the end of the certainty you still have, and bend, and learn to marshal their conviction, to sacrifice some truths for the sake of others.
It would be sick to say that to a woman who had lived the life Izza lived, who fought like she fought, without the safety of the lies Kai grew up swaddled in. But Kai felt that way, and maybe she was right.
Izza stood there, waiting.
So easy to look out at the world through warped glass and think the world was warped itself. Easy, too, to live in a warped world and forget that, with effort, you could make crooked lines straight.
“Say we work together,” Kai said.
One corner of Izza’s mouth quirked up. “Say.”
“What’s next?”
“We have two groups circling each other—the Iskari, and Zeddig. We need to find our way into both. I can get us a lead on the delvers. Bescond, though—”
“I’ll handle her.”
Chapter Thirty-one
TOO MANY PEOPLE CAME to Vogel’s meeting.
Zeddig and Raymet and Gal reached the taproom on time, and Ley, too, masked, her fake coppery hair braided in a high coil atop her head. Ley marched imperious past the rattling roulette wheel and the torn velvet craps table where drunk pierced men rolled dice and screamed at one another, and the young man passed out in a puddle of what Zeddig hoped was beer, as the tap master guided them downstairs to the pool hall where they’d arranged to meet Vogel and his hand-picked hoodlums.
When the tapmaster opened the door and thirty heads turned toward her, lizards’ heads and maskorovim and steel shields of warmade men, clattering mandibles, eye patches, and, at the far end of the room, Vogel, Zeddig realized that she should have expected this sort of bullshit. “Pleasure to see you, ladies,” Vogel said, one hand raised, his teeth yellow in the lamplight. “Now we’re all here, let’s get down to business.”
“Vogel,” Zeddig said. “Can we talk outside?”
The meat-mounds seated on and around the billiards tables grumbled. Knuckles cracked. It was hard to drink beer menacingly, but these guys had practice. Raymet stepped back. Gal didn’t step forward. She just smiled.
“Absolutely,” Vogel said. “Is the stairwell private enough?”
Ley followed, and closed the door behind herself. Zeddig felt a moment’s concern for Raymet and Gal, then remembered Gal’s smile, and saved her concern for Vogel’s muscle.
Vogel examined the nail of his forefinger, which was peeling away from the nail bed. “Who are you?” he asked Ley.
“The talent,” Ley replied. “I thought this was supposed to be a small operation.”
“Exigencies, my dear Talent,” Vogel said. He pressed the loose nail against his thumb, and it peeled back. Something wriggled underneath. “So you’re the one who convinced Zeddig to dirty her hands? I owe you a favor.”
/> “I’m the one,” Ley said, “who wants to make sure this job goes smoothly, and no micromanaging loan shark fucks everything up.”
Vogel left his nail alone, and went still.
“Let’s all calm down,” Zeddig said. “Okay? Vogel, this is a larger group than we expected. That’s all.”
The crowd behind the closed door cheered. The cheers didn’t sound violent, so Zeddig kept her attention on Vogel. “I’m sure these are nice guys. Trustworthy. But it doesn’t take a traitor to fuck up a plan. We only need one talkative drunk.”
“I vouch for them.” Vogel raised one hand to Ley, open, palm up, at the level of her jaw. He might have tried to cup her chin, if he hadn’t been worried Ley might break his hand. “As I’m sure you vouch for her.”
“You brought thirty strangers into this job,” Ley said, “just to start.”
“It’s a question of profit margin.” Vogel returned his attention to the nail. Zeddig knew him just well enough to tell the difference between Vogel bored and Vogel faking boredom because he didn’t want to meet your gaze. “You’re only taking my people halfway, you said. So I hired Klieg’s crew to guide the retrieval team.”
“Klieg’s a butcher.” In Agdel Lex, there were delvers and then there were delvers—some born here, some came for the history, or to see traces of the God Wars firsthand. Some, like Klieg, came for the souls they could earn selling history on the black market.
“Precisely why I wanted you on this job, dear Zeddig. But I need someone to escort my cargo home. And, as long as I’m hiring Klieg and you, we can bring even more personnel and equipment. Which will, in turn, allow us to recover more cargo than I’d otherwise dare. You called the dance. I’m just figuring out how to play the tune.” Boots stomped in fierce, excited rhythm behind the closed door. “Do we understand each other?”
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