“Ma’am, please. Remain calm.”
“I just wanted to talk with that guy.” Pointing to Margot, who sat now, she saw, among his ragged poet friends, pointedly ignoring her.
The rather large gentleman on the right took her arm, and she pulled it away, sharply. “Don’t touch me.”
Which, all things considered, was not the best course of action. The gentleman on the left now reached for her as well, and she drew back, and tightened her fingers around her walking stick. Drink and anger pounded a rapid tattoo on the drum of her heart.
“Boys. Kai.” Mako’s voice, behind her. Beneath the noise of crowd and argument she’d missed the tap of his approaching footsteps, and his stick. “What seems to be the trouble?”
“No trouble,” said the gentleman—or boy—on the left. Both straightened slightly.
“No trouble,” Kai said. “I was just making my way back to our table.” And she winked at the bouncers, turned her back on them, and led Mako through the crowd.
“What was that?” the old man said when they were seated again.
“Didn’t want to talk to me,” she said. “Is he always an asshole?”
“He’s been blocked for a while now. Lot of stress. Doesn’t excuse the assholery, but then he’s Iskari. Their assholes get graded on a curve.”
She felt the sinking tension in her gut unwind a little. “I missed you, Mako.”
“You don’t miss shit. Months we haven’t seen a hair of you. And you’re getting dead drunk as soon as you’re back, not because you’re happy. What happened?”
“Who said anything happened?” She raised her hand and searched the crowd for a waiter.
“Your cane, and the fact that you almost started a fight with two bouncers three times your size.”
“Hospital. Basically. And I was moved to a new job. And I don’t want to talk about it.”
“I’ve known too many men who didn’t want to talk, and women, too. Not talking doesn’t end any way but bad.”
She shifted in the chair, and her back sang its protest. She’d felt lithe and smooth walking down to the coast from the cable car, cane tucked under her arm like a swagger stick, hands in suit pant pockets, reveling in freedom, in the round sweet scent of barbecue fires, of flowers and incense and skin. She’d knotted around herself in the intervening hours’ sit. And around Mako, who she hadn’t seen since Claude. “Claude and I broke up. Did I tell you?”
“Good riddance.” More whiskey drained, to her and then to the Gleb poet, who delivered the final verse of a tight acrostic to the vigorous applause of a table in the third row back, either friends or structuralists. “Guy’s collar’s too white for you anyway.”
“Hells does that mean? He’s city watch. I wear ties for a living.”
“Once a shipbuilder’s daughter, always a shipbuilder’s daughter. Those calluses don’t rub off easy.”
“They rub off easy enough. And his dad was a fisherman.”
“Time in a Penitent breaks that out of you.”
“If you say so.”
Behind, on the beach, two lovers lay between the legs of a tall stone Penitent, sand covered and kissing. The idol’s teeth, she remembered, had torn her lips. The island is our prison. Howl, bound world.
“I wanted to ask him about his poem. That’s all. I heard the line somewhere.”
“Likely. It’s famous. Become famous, fast.”
Was that it? Had she overheard the words, seen them in a magazine perhaps, woven them into her dreams? Was Jace right? Had blood loss and panic blurred memories together? “Just wanted to talk to him, that’s all.”
“Mainlanders have a saying about good intentions.”
“Road to hell’s paved with them?”
“I’ve been there,” he said, “and it ain’t. But even wrong sayings have a point. Maybe you should take it easy.”
“I came here to get drunk and pity myself. Without the second what’s the point of the first?”
“You came here,” Mako said. “That’s the important thing. But you’ve been cooped up too long, and you want to do everything at once, and if you try half of that you’ll break yourself so bad even the madmen up the mountain won’t be able to put you back together again.”
She laughed. “Blasphemer.”
“I fought gods and demons with these hands.” He laid them palms down on the table. His right third finger jagged at a sharp angle from the joint; his left pinkie would not lie flat. Dirt caked his nails. “I’ve earned blasphemy. Sleep and come back in a few days. Don’t take everything so fast. If you wake up tomorrow morning with Makawe’s own headache, vomiting your guts all over those nice silk sheets, you’ll blame me for it and you won’t come down here again for months. I’d miss you.”
“My sheets are cotton.”
“Don’t storm the beaches, Kai. Never ends well.”
“Nice. Patronizing.”
“‘Patronizing’s’ an interesting word. You think I’m acting like I’m your father, or like you’re a rich idiot who needs to be told what’s what about art?”
“Both, I guess.” She let go of her head. “Maybe you’re right.” She stood with the cane’s aid, and while the muscles in her side protested and pulled, she managed to hold herself up, and even took a step without falling. She left coin on the table with enough soulstuff to cover her tab. Nothing tied her here now. She did not have to lean far over to touch the old man’s crooked hand. “I’ll see you, Mako.”
“Thanks for the drinks.”
Margot stepped back onto the stage, into the burning spot. A light rain of applause fell. He removed his hat. Sweat beaded his forehead. Lips tightened, opened, a pink tip of tongue darted out to wet them. Thick hands wrung his hat brim.
I didn’t ask to be here
“Neither did the rest of us,” Kai said, and left.
10
Nick wasn’t easy to find. Izza made the mistake of asking Ivy where he spent his time these days, which Ivy claimed not to know, though of course she did. Not weeks before Ivy would have told Izza anything she asked, would have spun fantastic tales in an attempt to please. Now she lied, and badly.
For which Izza had no one to blame but herself. Taking in Cat, announcing the end of their game of gods and goddesses, saying she’d run rather than let herself be caught for a Penitent—the kids might not know what to think, but at least they knew not to trust her. Good instincts. Not great, or else they would have run away themselves years ago, but good.
So Ivy, who Nick trusted and liked, cared for almost as for the kid sister he claimed he never had, said she hadn’t seen Nick in a while, and must have put out word that Izza was looking, because after that Nick was nowhere to be found, his old haunts unhaunted, his Godsdistrikt rooftop pallet abandoned, and his cubby holes throughout East Claw cub-less.
Which might sound like it left an entire island for Izza to search, but in truth there were only so many places a kid looking to steal rich could go. A crooked alchemist who came to Kavekana to cook dreamdust had once explained the principle to Izza. You drew (and he drew, in the dust with his fingertip) a simple graph—put value on the vertical axis, and risk on the horizontal. The value-risk curve for most endeavors, criminal and otherwise, increases steadily to the right. The more comfortable you are with risk, the more value you might realize. The more value you wanted to realize, the more comfortable you had to be with risk. Kavekana (he said) was too risky for most crooks, but the combination of spendy sailors and mainlanders come for business promised high value.
The alchemist was taken for a Penitent soon after, but he left his graph behind, which had to count for something, even though Izza wasn’t sure why he called the line a curve when it looked straight.
Anyway. The Godsdistrikt was low value, low risk. Few Penitents, little attention from the watch, because who cared what foreign sailors got up to so long as they didn’t trouble the good people of Kavekana—those being, of course, the people of Kavekana who happened to look and talk
like the ones in the Watch. Your average sailor didn’t have much soulstuff, though, and tended to keep what little he had locked deep inside his own head. A few pieces of preciously guarded jewelry, a keepsake or two you could steal, a purse of coin. Not much else. Sailors watched where they put themselves.
But if you were comfortable with more risk, Penitent-wise—that is, if you were incurably stupid—you might decide to pursue a higher class of mark.
You’d stay clear of longtime wealthy residents, with their strong wards and stronger connections, but there were easily a dozen upscale resorts in West Claw and the Palm, let alone all the beaches and nightclubs and gyms where tourists and business visitors might leave their stuff unattended for the brief magic moment said stuff needed to grow wings and fly away.
Still too much territory to search.
Izza swam into the secret room in the back of the warehouse, to the altar where she’d piled her spoils. Quite a stack, there—wallets and purses and pouches and statues and jewelry. Even so, embarrassing that she hadn’t noticed Nick’s additions. Put it down to the shadows, or to the fact that Izza spent not an instant more than she needed back here these days. Too many bad memories. Too many corpses on the walls.
In all, Nick had added five wallets, leather and elegant and fat with soul, and three purses in questionable high-fashion taste. They held family pictures, thick wads of banknotes, Iskari and Camlaander and Ebonwald and Coulumbite, each stamped with a priestly sigil. No clue to their origins, all documents bearing names chucked into the bay long since.
She picked up a polka-dotted velvet purse and squeezed it in frustration, feeling coins shift round and hard beneath her fingers. Coins, and something else—long, slender, pointed at one end. Izza cleared a space on the floor and dumped the purse’s contents out. Coins, only coins, even in the slight starlight she could see that much. But the purse still clunked against the damp floorboards when she let it fall.
Interesting.
She probed inside the purse with her forefinger, and found a narrow pouch sewn into the lining. No button, only fabric tucked into fabric. Opening the pocket, she drew from within a skeleton key, one end all twisted teeth and the other capped by a medallion inlaid with a tinted mother-of-pearl logo: a mountain bisected by a crescent of blue ocean to form an abstract letter A.
In her dark room, empty but for her stolen treasure and the paintings of her dead gods, Izza swore.
* * *
The Aokane Plaza was a seashore palace cradled in Kavekana’s Palm, or at least that’s what its brochures claimed. Multilayered terraces and balconies draped with ghostlights and spackled by tiki torches overlooked the rolling ocean. Guests and waiters, servants and masters, flowed up and down the Plaza’s many staircases, and along the ramps that connected the hotel and its beachside cabanas. Unnaturally white and gleaming, writhing with human bodies, the hotel reminded Izza of a layer cake overrun by ants and set afire.
Though the Plaza had long since lost claim to the title of Kavekana’s most elegant or exclusive resort, its guests remained rich, and numerous enough that a child could drift among them if she walked fast and didn’t linger. If Izza wanted to steal up-market, she’d start here. She’d discussed the issue with Nick before.
The Plaza’s back rooms were a maze, miles of hallways and basements and kitchens and servants’ passages, but she didn’t need to worry about most of that. Nick, if he were here, wouldn’t be anywhere without people he could steal from. That meant public spaces, which left her plenty of ground to cover.
She approached from the beach. Barefoot waiters in white vests and capris whisked cocktails on silver trays from cabana to cabana. On a stage by the ocean, a band of young men and women wearing old Kavekana royal garb, multicolored print kilts and shawls and feathered cloaks, drummed drums and played ukulele; a woman with a pearl circlet at her brow sang a high winnowing song in the lilting local tongue, of which Izza had never learned more than a few words. Far as Izza could tell, the song’s lyrics didn’t include “please,” “thank you,” “hide,” “run,” or any of the meanings of “watch” and “fence.” Behind the band, Penitents stared out into the rolling waves.
A green-skinned man with a taut protruding belly lay in a cabana beside a beautiful blonde covered in scars from her hairline to the soles of her feet. They nodded their heads in half time to the trilling drumbeat. Izza stole a towel from behind their hutch and wrapped it around herself to hide her clothes. She drifted upstream past waiters and those they served. The served were the more varied of the two groups, in a way: the well-heeled of six continents and three thousand cities, of every skin color and creed and species, living and undead, skeletal or carved from stone or pink and flexible, those floppy with excess flesh, these sculpted by surgery and personal trainers into hilariously exaggerated visions of human potential. But their faces all played small changes on the same bovine physical contentment. The servers, though—locals mostly, men and women alike hired to look good in uniform—watch their faces and you’d see a greater range of attitudes. Some loved their job, some resented it, some were tired and others keen and a few hopped up on coke or joss, and that woman kneeling now to set the glasses from her tray onto a low table beside a chair on which sat a tangle of wire and thorns in the shape of a four-armed faceless man, she was three months pregnant.
Izza was taking too long. Don’t linger was the best rule a thief could follow. No Nick on this beach. Check the three balconies, and get gone, out into safety and night.
On the first balcony, steam rose from a pool the color of molten emerald. Ghostlights highlighted swimmers’ bodies within. Other guests lay in various stages of undress beside the pool; a three-armed skeleton angled a tanning mirror to catch the moon. No Nick here, either.
The second balcony was the ground floor: bar, reception, an empty stage, two open-air restaurants perched like Telomiri duelists across the courtyard from each other, Fabrice’s and Escalier, and she imagined the maître d’ of each concocting mad plots to ensnare or embarrass his rival, escalating until the hotel burned down in a cascade of envy and charred timber. More people here, three different kinds of waiters, a young woman in the hotel’s gray uniform hovering with a dustpan and broom, eyeing the world reflected in the polished marble floor for the smallest flaw. Quartet of suited Iskari, you could tell by their cuffs, drinking wine with a Glebland merchant. A family in swim trunks and T-shirts, over from the New World for vacation. A few Craft-types drowning in paperwork.
No Nick.
The third balcony was the smallest, a hundred feet across at most but positioned so those seated there could see no other balcony, only the ocean a long way off and the city a long way down. Two narrow staircases led up to that level from the ground floor, each in clear view. Only an idiot would try to sneak up those stairs, or someone who thought the safest play was the play nobody saw coming.
Which was just another way of saying, idiot.
Izza picked up a slick pamphlet of hotel activities—5:42 A.M. sunrise tantra, accompanied in the brochure by a reproduced watercolor of a white woman with honey-colored hair twisted into some sort of Dhisthran exercise posture and smiling as if she enjoyed it. 8:30 complementary diving lesson, 10:00 beach golf, which who knew what that was, 11:15 crossbow skeet. Izza paced in front of the girl with the dustpan, lips pursed as if she were trying to decide between Traditional Kavekanese Woodburning and Ocean Water Polo Tricks and Tips for tomorrow afternoon, then shrugged, crumpled the pamphlet, and let it fall. The girl with the dustbin slid in behind, swept up the pamphlet, turned without a word, and retreated toward the cream-colored rear wall, and through a door Izza hadn’t seen at first.
Izza followed the girl into a windowless hallway painted the off-white managers painted places where they wanted work done. The girl turned right, headed for a large trash can at the end of the hall; Izza turned left into a stairwell and sketched around a corner out of sight. She heard the door open and close again—the girl, presumably, re
turning to the courtyard and patrol.
No more footsteps in the service hall. Good. Towel still wrapped around herself—no sense abandoning a fitting disguise—Izza climbed two flights of stairs and reached a hallway that smelled of fire and kitchens and knives. A stenciled label opposite the stair pointed left to Level Three Restaurant, and Izza retreated to the turn in the stair as a tuxedoed waiter rushed down the hall above, cursing, a decorative white towel draped over one arm and a large domed tray teetering on the fingertips of his white-gloved hand. Another door opened, and closed; she waited a breath, climbed back to Level Three, and turned left.
She almost ran into Nick.
He wore the hotel grays, and carried a pink purse slung over his shoulder, obvious and obviously not his. He froze when he saw her, then double-took when he recognized her, face pale with the fear of the discovered. He pulled back, hands raised, warding, but too slow. Izza grabbed him by the purse strap and tugged him down the hall to the stairs.
“What are you doing here?” he hissed.
“That’s my line.” They rounded the turn of the stair, and, safe for a second, she shoved him against the wall, hard. “Are you crazy?”
“I’m helping.” Fire and fear sparked from his eyes. “Helping us when you won’t. Let me go.”
“You’re stealing things people will notice gone, and bringing Plaza keys straight back to the warehouse. They can trace those, Nick.”
He blinked. “I didn’t—”
“You almost led them to the altar. Because you didn’t think this through.”
“You were stocking up,” he said. “I wanted to help.”
She ripped the purse off his shoulder. “And you think someone who came to a restaurant with a purse won’t notice their damn purse is gone? What’s with you?”
“Like jumping into dreamdust dens is smart?”
“That doesn’t get the Watch after you. This will.” She opened the purse, dug through its silver sateen guts, found the wallet and the room key. “You really work here?”
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