Sworn in Steel

by Douglas Hulick

  In the end, though, it wasn’t a dagger in the dark that caught up with me; it was a pair of Cutters waiting for me as I came out of a second-story bone shop well after midnight.

  “Any luck with the dice?” said the taller of the two as he leaned up against the wall in the stairwell. He was smooth—of face, of manner, of voice—with a smile that reminded me of a knife. Farther down the stairs, his partner—a brick of a man—stood eating sweet rice out of a folded palm leaf. He didn’t bother to look up at us.

  I sighed and put away the few coins I’d acquired while talking to the gamblers inside. “Is this going to take long?” I said. “I have things to do.”

  The man shrugged himself away from the wall. “Who knows? I’m just the hired help. But,” he said, indicating the stairs, “I will note that this is the only way out. . . .”

  He showed the blade of his grin again. I walked down the stairs. The one eating rice deigned to nod as I passed.

  My, but they raised them polite down here.

  There was a sedan chair waiting in the street. It was respectable as these things went, with a painted door in the side and wicker screens covering the windows. The roof had a pair of folding panels, which had been pulled back to reveal more screens up top. Even this far on the thieves’ side of midnight, el-Qaddice could hold on to the day’s heat, radiating it back along the alleys and, I’d guess, into any enclosed boxes traveling through them.

  Eight bearers crouched against the wall beside the stairs, passing a skin between them and drinking deeply. My night vision was still sleeping from the gaming den, but I didn’t need it to see the sheen of sweat that covered the men’s bare backs. They moved with all the crispness and energy of a wet rag, making me wonder just how used they were to their job.

  Then one of the screens slid down and I understood a bit better.

  To say the man inside was vast would have been like saying the sea was deep, or the desert sun was warm. He spread to fill the entirety of the seat, his silk-covered sides pressing against the arms of his chair. A leg like the mast of small schooner sat propped up on a tasseled pillow, the foot wrapped in linen and smelling of unguents and poultice. The earthy, acrid aroma called up memories of Eppyris and his apothecary shop, back before I’d caused him to become a cripple and made his wife hate me. I took a step back from the man and, for the sake of those feelings alone, decided I already disliked him.

  “For someone new to el-Qaddice,” he said in Djanese, not bothering to look up from the piece of paper he was folding, “you’ve managed to achieve a great deal in a surprisingly short amount of time. Tentative patronage? Housing at the padishah’s expense? I’m impressed.”

  “I like to keep myself busy.”

  “Yes, I can see that.” His thick fingers, surprising in their dexterity, never stopped moving across the paper. “I’m much the same myself, although I know I don’t look it. My pastimes are more . . . sedentary.”

  “I never would have guessed.”

  A slight pursing of his lips beneath his thin mustache. “Yes, well. The hour’s late. I was wondering if I could interest you in a cup of tea, so that we might discuss our business in a more comfortable setting?”

  I crossed my arms. “Not thirsty.”

  “Then a light meal, perhaps? I understand your people are fond of stuffed grape leaves. I know a cook who can—”

  “Not hungry, either.”

  I knew I was being rude, but I didn’t care. In offering to share his salt, the Zakur was also offering me his protection—at least for the duration of the meal. It was an old Djanese custom, built on countless generations of life among the dunes, where simple hospitality could be the difference between life and death. By declining, I was saying I didn’t trust him to keep his word. A slap in the face of his honor, I admit, but at this point I didn’t know if he had enough honor for my insult to leave a mark in the first place, and I wasn’t willing to risk my life to find out.

  “I see.” He raised one finger slightly in the process of folding the paper, and I suddenly felt cool steel at the side of the throat.

  The man set the paper down on his broad lap and looked at me. “Since you insist on behaving like a barbarian,” he said, “we’ll proceed in the imperial manner. Abul?”

  A sharp, quick punch caught me above the kidney at precisely the same instant the knife vanished from my neck. I gasped and dropped to one knee.

  “There,” said the man, picking up the paper again. “Now that we have the requisite violence out of the way, I can explain why I’m here.” He wiped a fleck of my spit from the window edge. “I wanted to make something clear: The Imperial Quarter doesn’t belong to you. It will never belong to you. There are no great sheikhs of the Kin among your people here. No Rufflers or ‘Standing Men’ or—”

  “Upright Men,” I said from my knees.

  “What?”

  “They’re called Upright Men, you bastard. Get it right.”

  Another flick of the finger, another punch. I winced and didn’t quite fall over.

  “No Upright Men,” he said. The chair groaned as he leaned his head out the window. Several of the bearers started to stand, ready for a collapse that didn’t come. “And no Gray Princes, either,” he added.

  My eyes shot up to meet his.

  “Yes,” he said, his eyes crinkling with a smile. “I think we understand each other.”

  I nodded. No stirring up the local Kin. Fragmented and frustrated was how they liked them, and a Gray Prince stepping in to give a bit of order—or even worse, a sense of purpose—wouldn’t sit well with the native crime bosses.

  I didn’t bother asking how he’d figured out who I was. This was his—the Zakur’s—city: If anyone could gather up enough whispers and rumors and bits of overheard conversation to piece it together, it would be them. Even if it was a guess, it was one I’d confirmed with my look.

  No, I wasn’t overly surprised that they’d sussed me out; I just wanted to know how they’d done it so damn quickly.

  The Zakur . . . Angle Master? Ruffler? Upright Man? . . . turned back to his folding. “You realize that I say this merely to avoid any misunderstandings between your esteemed personage and my own people. We recognize and respect your position and your prestige.”

  “Of course you do,” I said, looking back at the Cutters.

  “Of course. Ah, there!” He made one last fold and held up what had become a paper reproduction of a desert wolf. It was damn good. “A frivolous pastime, I admit, but one that requires great precision and planning.”

  “Speaking of frivolous,” I said as I climbed to my feet, “you could’ve delivered this message any of a dozen different ways: by the street, via a messenger, through a Prig or Beggar Boss . . . hell, you could have even written it on a folded fucking frog, for that matter.”

  He looked at me through narrowed, puffy eyelids. “True.”

  “Which means there’s more to this than just warning me off.”

  Another twitch of his lips. “I can see why you’re an emir of your kind. Yes, there’s another reason.”

  “And that reason is?”

  He turned to more fully face me. The sedan chair creaked in protest, and I caught a renewed whiff of the damp peat and vinegar scent coming from his foot as the air shifted about him. Gout? Worse?

  “Why are you here?” he said.

  I blinked. Smiled. Would have laughed in his face if I didn’t think it would’ve gotten me killed in that moment.

  Why was I here? The very question I would have likely asked if a Grand Sheikh of the Zakur were to show up in Ildrecca. What did he want? What were his plans? Who was he working with? Because, Angels knew, someone like that—someone like me—didn’t just show up this far from home for no particular reason, and certainly not without making contact with the local powers that be if he didn’t want them to be nervous.

  Only I had, because instead of thinking like a Prince, I’d been acting like a Nose. Again.

  Dammit.
<
br />   There was no good answer. Whatever I told him would be carved up and held to the light. Lies would be assumed, duplicity expected, misdirection anticipated.

  Fuck it. I decided to tell him the truth.

  “I’m here looking for someone.”

  “And?”

  “And what? That’s it.”

  The corners of his mouth turned up, his heavy lips making the smile look like something between a smirk and a pout. “You could have searched in a dozen different ways,” he said. “Through the Kin, an agent, a local boss—even by writing a note on a folded fucking frog; surely you don’t expect me to believe that a Gray Prince would come all the way to Djan just to search for someone?”

  “It’s not my problem what you decide to believe.”

  “Ah, but it is.” He settled back into his seat and held up the paper figure, rotating it gently between his fingers. “Because what I believe can directly affect what you accomplish here.”

  “You don’t want to cross me,” I said. “Not in this. It doesn’t concern you.”

  His eyes turned back to me. They were small, hard things now. “You threaten me?”

  “I warn you.”

  He stared at me for a long time—or what felt like a long time: It was hard to tell given the rapid pounding of my heart. When it became apparent that neither of us was about to back down, he grunted and turned away. He snapped his fingers, and the bearers rushed forward to put their shoulders beneath the rails of his chair.

  “It has come to my attention,” he said as the chair lurched upward, “that someone has been smuggling magic from the empire into el-Qaddice over the past few months. I believe you used to smuggle relics into the Despotate not so long ago, yes?”

  I kept my face blank, even as my guts rolled over inside me. He knew about the glimmer? Angels—just how much had Jelem sent down here? And more important, how many shipments had he moved in the last few months?

  “Dealing in relics and dealing in glimmer are two different things,” I said, my voice even.

  “But smuggling is still smuggling, no matter what the nature of the goods. And in my city, I oversee the smuggling of all things magical.” He looked down at me from his enclosed perch. “Don’t think us such the fools that we can’t see why you’re truly here, Shadow Prince. You would do well to think about handing the magic over, as well as disbanding whatever organization you’re putting together. As I said, the Old City is ours: You don’t want to challenge us.”

  “And if I say I don’t have anything to do with any smuggled glimmer?” I said. I decided not to mention anything about my not having an organization.

  “I would say only a foolish man denies a truth that’s obvious to all.”

  I crossed my arms. “You have no idea how foolish I can be when I put my mind to it.”

  He smiled. “Truly, this answer pleases me to no end.” The screen to the chair slid up.

  It wasn’t until after he and his Cutters were gone that I noticed a folded bit of paper lying at my feet: the wolf. Only, I realized when I picked it up, it wasn’t a wolf; rather, it was a hyena. A hyena with hunched shoulders and an open mouth and a lolling tongue: laughing. At me.

  I walked away, leaving his message torn and crumpled in the street.

  Chapter Eighteen

  After that, I threw myself at the street for the rest of that night and the following day. Where before I’d been lingering in the backs of low taverns and roosting kens, buying drinks to loosen other people’s tongues, now I took the more direct route. When steel wasn’t bared, it was shown, and my silver now carried the occasional smudge of red when it changed hands. I brandished my name like a blade, cowing those who knew better, and buying off or educating those who didn’t. These were Kin: Even here, under the thumb of the Zakur, I knew how to read them, how to talk to them—and how to scare the hell out of them when necessary.

  Nothing happened in the Imperial Quarter without the Zakur’s say-so? I couldn’t find Degan without their protection? I was a Gray Prince, dammit: Fuck them.

  Still, that didn’t mean I had to be stupid about it. Where I dropped my name, I did it in such a way that it wasn’t attached to me. I was an agent, a front man, a sounder sent ahead to prepare the ground or ask the questions. I was both interested and disinterested in el-Qaddice, solidifying my position in Ildrecca or expanding outward. I was presence and ghost, a fact and a rumor. Anything to muddy the waters for Fat Chair—yes, that was the cove in the sedan’s name—and make him wonder just what the hell was going on.

  Anything, in short, to gain me some time.

  As for Degan, he was proving as hard to pin down as ever. Even with him being a tall, fair-haired westerner in a land of dusky, dark-eyed Djanese, few people recalled having heard of him, let alone seen him. The best I was able to collect was a handful of stale memories about a man who might have been Degan wandering into the Imperial Quarter for a few days, and then wandering back out. That had been a month ago, and from what I could gather he’d spent most of his time strolling the bazaars and sampling street food. No word about a foreign blade selling his sword; no rumors of him signing on with a local noble or steel house. No trail of bodies or coins to follow.

  All of which meant I was going to have to widen my search beyond the Imperial Quarter. Not a surprise, but part of me had been hoping Degan would stick close to what he knew. Working the Old City would require more time, money, and muscle than I had. It would require me to operate low to the ground, finding informers and sorting rumors as I went. That meant a lot of dirty Mumblers and questionable Ears, more than half of whom would either feed me a crooked line of patter or sell me to the Zakur if they could manage it. Plus, thanks to both Heron and Wolf, I was going to be doing all of this on a tight timeline.

  No, this wasn’t going to be easy at all.

  By the time I made it back to the Angel’s Shadow, it was well past noon on the day after I’d left. My feet were dragging and my head was pounding. I only had one ahrami seed left from the stash Heron had given me, and I was saving that for when I woke up, hopefully sometime tomorrow morning. Late tomorrow morning.

  I found Tobin and his people in the courtyard, hard at work on the new play. Those not reading lines were fitting together the framing for the backdrops.

  The moment he saw me, Tobin turned and started forward, displeasure writ large on his face. Fortunately for the troupe leader, Ezak caught the look in my eye and took his cousin by the elbow, steering him to another corner of the yard. Sounds of a brief but heated discussion drifted over as the rest of the troupe—even Muiress—gave me a wide berth. I made it to the inn’s door without incident and went inside.

  Fowler was sitting in the window nearest the door, one leg propped up in the sunlight, watching the rehearsal. Her hair was loose and falling over her left shoulder, the light of the sun turning it to gold. I blinked, surprised to see it down. It took me a moment longer to realize she wasn’t in her street clothes—or, at least, not her normal street clothes. The well-worn travel shirt and coat had been replaced by finer stuff: a high-necked linen doublet of ivy green, its front only partially laced, with the shirt underneath likewise at ease across her collarbone. Her breeches were new, and tailored noticeably more for a woman than a man, which I found . . . distracting. The lines hugged her legs closely, until, just above the knee, the pants stopped. Below were her usual hose and low shoes. Even those looked freshly brushed.

  Fowler shifted slightly in the window and ran a critical eye over me. “I’m guessing you didn’t sleep.”

  “That would have required me to stop moving.”

  “Well, as long as you had a good reason . . .”

  I pointed at her clothes. “What’s this?”

  “What’s what?”

  “The outfit. Is it for the play?”

  Fowler stared at me for a moment, then turned back toward the courtyard.

  “I borrowed it from the troupe,” she said. “Sent my drapes to be laundered. After th
is long on the road, they could use it.” She sniffed meaningfully and wiped at her nose. “Wouldn’t hurt you any, either.”

  I scratched at my chest, suddenly self-conscious. “When I have time.”

  “You could always ask Muiress.”

  “I’d prefer they come back in one piece.”

  “There is that.”

  I watched her watch the players for a moment, then turned my gaze toward the troupe.

  Ever since Fowler had come back to work for me, things had been . . . different. Before, when I’d just been a Nose and she, the person who watched over my apartments, it had been easy: Easy to talk, easy to spend time with one another, easy to fall in bed together every now and again. But that had changed when she’d learned I’d spent the past seven years lying to her about who I had actually worked for—who, in some sense, I actually was. As a Long Nose, there had been no way for me to tell her that I worked for Kells and not Nicco, but that justification hadn’t lessened her sense of betrayal any. Nor would I have expected it to.

  So I hadn’t been surprised when she’d walked away. Even when I’d been named a Gray Prince, she hadn’t returned. And then, a month later, she was suddenly back. One day, Broken Daniel was covering my blinders; the next, Fowler was back on the rooftops, her people watching my home. She never explained why she’d come back, and I’d never pushed, just as I’d never asked what had passed between her and Broken Daniel. Sometimes, it’s simply better not to ask.

  But ever since, there had been . . . not a distance, but a guardedness to her. I still trusted Fowler with my life—more so than anyone, now that Degan was gone—and while we still slipped into old habits now and then, it was clear a line had been drawn in her head when it came to me. Some aspects of that line were obvious, others, less so.

  This, it seemed, was one of the less obvious times.