And a treat it turned out to be. As the old orange sun dropped behind the ornate facades of the multistoried houses on the west side of The Old Circular, like an arthritic old man lowering himself gingerly into his bath, I tasted the Master’s plate of the day: a platter of eighteen meat, vegetable, and nut pastes, into which one dipped pieces of a fine-crumbed bread studded with amarast seeds. The different pastes could be combined on one cob of the bread to produce remarkable combinations of sweet and savory, mellow and fiery, bold and subtle. A bottle of vintage Janvari red made a perfect accompaniment, along with a carafe of palate-cleansing improved water.
I dined alone, though I was aware of glances cast my way and whispered comments. Word had passed about my purpose in being there this evening. For my part, I let my gaze follow the comings and goings of pedestrians on the square. My intent was to spot not only Massim Shar’s cut-out but the other member of his criminal coterie who would be there to watch our transaction. There might even be a watcher to watch the watcher, trust being a commodity in short supply among the lawless. I meant to have records of them all, captured by a suite of devices unobtrusively built into my clothing.
It was the time of day when those who cared about fashion walked in the evening air, showing each other their finery. The style this season, for men, was close-fitting, long-tailed coats, accompanied by tall, cylindrical hats and tight, knee-high boots; for women, elegance came in the form of collarless dresses that fit tight above the bust and at the knee, though in between the fabric ballooned out on hidden stays to create an illusion that the body beneath must be spherical. The combined effect of so many ambulatory sticks and balls, each of whom wore an expression of complete self-satisfaction, added strength to my longstanding belief that the profession of couturier required only a good knowledge of fabric and a malicious sense of humor.
The time for the connection with Massim Shar’s agent was drawing near. When she had brought me the platter of pastes, the server had pointed out to me the different strengths of the eighteen sauces, advising me to save for last the meat puree doused in Sheeshah’s Nine Dragons Sauce, predicting that once it struck my palate, the dish’s other, subtler flavors would be unable to register. I now scooped up a good pinch of the stuff, made sure my tumbler of improved water was full and to hand, and popped the laden bread into my mouth. There was a pause—my taste buds may well have gone into shock for a moment—then the full weight of Master Jho-su’s genius crashed upon my senses. My eyes widened, simultaneously flinging a gush of tears down my cheeks, my tongue desperately sought an exit from my mouth, and my nose and sinuses reported that they had been suddenly and inexplicably connected to a volcanic flume.
I groped for the tumbler and took a healthy gulp, but the water seemed to evaporate before it even reached my throat. I drank more, my free hand finding the carafe even as I drained the glass. I could scarcely see to pour a refill and ended up drinking directly from the larger container. Gradually, the inferno in my mouth subsided to a banked fire. I wiped my streaming eyes and sucked in a great breath and would not have been surprised, when I exhaled, to have emitted clouds of steam.
I glanced about me, using only the corners of my streaming eyes, and saw that my actions had drawn some amused smiles but just as many expressions of knowledgeable commiseration. Clearly, Nine Dragons Sauce had previously claimed the unwary as its victims, and I was relieved to know that the effects were not permanent. I drank some more of the improved water, felt it begin to repair my outraged tissues, and signaled the server to bring me the bill. The woman did so with that carefully neutral face which fits a great waiter to become a senior diplomat, if she is willing to accept the plunge in status. I added a generous gratuity and, wiping my eyes once more, looked out across The Old Circular.
Between the perambulating orbs and scepters, I spotted a lean and wiry specimen in a shapeless jacket and a wide-brimmed hat pulled low. He was moving at a steady pace toward the meeting point. I scanned the square again, and saw another man loitering at the mouth of an alley, his attitude casual but his eyes never leaving the path of the man in the hat.
I spoke the phrase that activated my surveillance suite and rose from the table, stepped over the low ornamental fence that enclosed The Pot of Fire’s outer terrace, and moved out into the square. Behind me, I heard a sudden rise in the buzz of conversation and knew that my fellow diners would now be entertaining themselves and each other with speculations as to the nature of my case and what might happen next.
My lips and tongue had had the benefit of a carafe of improved water, but my nasal apparatus had been left to deal with the effects of the conflagrant condiment all on its own. My nose was, therefore, still streaming and my sinuses remained as closed as business premises that had been gutted by fire. Still, I kept my eyes on the figure in the slouch hat as I wove among the fashionable pairs that wandered at random through the plaza, meaning to arrive at our mutual destination at the same moment. My attention thus occupied, I did not see the young woman until I walked right into her.
She bounced off me and fell, without grace, to the pavement. I stopped and looked down, receiving an indelible impression of an upturned, longish face, gone pale with shock beneath its crowded constellations of freckles, ornamented by two pale green eyes beneath a tumble of coppery red curls and ringlets, less than artfully arranged. A mouth that it would have been kind to have described as generous when closed was now gaping open in bewilderment. The cut of her clothes and footwear, a long, ivory-lace dress and latticed sandals, each with no more ornament than a few limp ribbons, argued that she might be from offworld, though I could not place the origin.
I was naturally annoyed, but I bent and offered her my hand. The fingers that took mine were not at all soft, and the grip they exerted when she began to pull herself up was strong. I made the briefest of apologies, pleading a matter of urgent business, and made to move past her; even if I had not been engaged in professional and potentially dangerous business I would not have tarried, for she was the complete combination of feminine attributes that I found least appealing—including, now that she was standing, more height than I commanded. She said nothing in reply, but gave me a look that mingled surprise with resentment, holding onto me until I had to use my free hand to gently release the one she still grasped.
“I am sorry,” I said, a statement that was not entirely true, “but you do not seem to be injured and I must keep an appointment.” With that, I turned and saw that the man in the hat was at the appointed place. I saw him consult his timepiece and glare about him with an air of angry suspicion. Politeness argued for pressing my card into the young woman’s hand, but I did not do so. Instead, I said, “I must go,” and, catching the waiting man’s eye, I forced myself through the pedestrians toward him. His air of resentful mistrust only deepened as he looked past me. I could only assume that the ungainly woman was staring at me, and therefore at him, since he was at the end of the beeline I was making across the square. His head now swiveled from side to side, doubtless expecting to see other eyes turned his way, and he became only slightly less apprehensive when I reached him and spoke the code word Irslan Chonder had given me.
“I was hurrying to make our appointment and bumped into the young woman,” I said.
He glanced furtively past me. “She’s looking at us.”
“At me,” I said. “She is probably angry.” And justifiably so, I supposed to myself; the pavements of The Old Circular were not made to receive falling buttocks in a gentle embrace, and from what I had seen of hers she had less cushioning than most.
He glanced about, twisting the cords in his neck. “I’m covered, if you try anything.”
“I’m not going to ‘try anything.’ Let us do our business.”
The arrangement was that he would show me the contents of one of the soul boxes. If the items tallied with the list I had been given, I would show him a credit pip in the amount of the ransom. Finally, after much peering about, accompanied by grunts
and half-voiced mutterings, we stepped into a nearby doorway. He took a small bundle of cloth from inside his jacket and unfolded it. Nestled in the fabric I saw a dried flower, a small length of jeweler’s chain, a silver coin bearing a likeness that had been worn away by decades of use, a round quartz pebble, and an animal’s canine tooth, along with a half-handful of gray grit.
“Very well,” I said. “We can do business.”
He refolded the cloth and tucked it away, then said, “Follow me.”
We went along the side of the square to where Ambledown Way began, but followed that thoroughfare only a short distance before we turned into a crooked alley that wound along the backs of several houses and shops. We soon came to a small open space where other alleys converged, crossed it, and went right, then down a flight of steps and through a door into a basement. My guide flicked on a small hand-held lumen and led me across a low-ceilinged room and through a gap that had been gouged in the opposite wall. We climbed a flight of stairs, passed through a door whose lock had been broken, and emerged into a ground-floor room of an empty house. Here we stopped and the cut-out consulted a button on the sleeve of his coat, saying to it, “What’s the lie?”
I could not hear whoever responded to him, but he nodded as if barely satisfied and said to me, “No one followed us.”
“Of course not,” I said.
“All right. Let’s go.”
We set off again, this time climbing through the untenanted house to the roof. On a landing stage waited a nondescript aircar. “Don’t think about tracing it,” the man said. “It’s stolen.”
“You needn’t have gone to the trouble just for me,” I said.
We got in. “I know who you are, you know,” he said, when we were airborne.
“That puts you one up on me.”
He muttered something I didn’t catch and didn’t care to; it was unlikely to have been a generous appreciation of my character. He applied himself to the aircar’s controls and we wove a varied course across the city, he several times again consulting his wrist button. Finally, when he was as satisfied as I suspected his nature could allow for, we spiraled down to a goods storage facility near the Creechy dockyard.
The man flew the aircar directly into the building through an open hatch on the upper floor. Here another man waited, clad from head to toe in a one-piece garment made of a flash-and-glitter fabric that could baffle most recording equipment—though not the suite I employed, most of which were made of unique systems designed and built by me.
The man I had come with handed me the cloth bundle and told me to get out of the hovering aircar. When I had done so, feeling the idling gravity obviators tugging at my legs, he turned the vehicle and flew away. The man in the incognito suit beckoned with one glittering hand. I noticed now that he wore a thin collar of dull metal around his neck, tight against the shining fabric. I again produced the credit pip but delayed handing it over. He moved to an inner wall and touched a control. The wall slid silently back and there were the stolen repositories, one of them open.
I stepped into the room and examined the goods, finding nothing missing and all in order. Only then did I turn over the pip. The scintillating man took it, examined it closely, tucked it away. A moment later, he was gone from the room. I made no attempt to follow but brought out my communicator and called Irslan Chonder.
“Your possessions are yours again,” I said, and gave the coordinates of the building.
“I want to know who took them.”
“You will know by the end of the evening.”
#
It was full dark by the time Chonder’s retainers had recovered the repositories and returned them to his manse in the Bells district. When he had seen them safe behind newly augmented defenses he flew me in his own cabriole back to my lodgings where we waited for news. I poured myself a glass of a calming cordial, Master Jho-su’s brilliance at the culinary arts being such as to create long-lasting effects, and meditated on the truth that different parts of the same system can have separate agendas: just because something pleased my palate was no guarantee that it would sit well with other components of my digestive tract.
I belched discreetly, and Irslan Chonder did not notice. Having refused refreshment and a welcoming armchair, he sat on a wooden stool, his torso hunched forward, his meaty forearms resting on his thighs and his hairy-backed fingers gripping each other so tightly that the flesh around the nails was squeezed bloodlessly pale. His eyes were narrowed but I knew that he gazed upon some inner vision that promised him grim satisfaction.
Now he came back from wherever his mind had taken him and turned his iron eyes toward me. “Well?” he said.
“Not long,” I assured him.
He grunted and fell back into his dark thoughts. I finished the cordial and poured myself another half-measure. The Nine Dragons continued to ramp and stamp through my innards, but I forgot the sensations when my integrator sounded a small chime and said, “We have a report.”
“Show me,” I said, and the screen appeared where Chonder and I could both view it. An image instantly filled it: one of the secluded private rooms at the rear of Bolly’s Snug. The tavern was clouded by a web of interwoven energies that led its habitués to believe that the premises were secure from all surveillance, whether by the Bureau of Scrutiny or from private pryings like mine. In that belief, they were largely correct. But I had found a way through the safeguards.
Any active surveillance device operating at Bolly’s would immediately have been detected and destroyed. But I had had success in sending in a bee that had attached itself to the clothing of someone who was heading for the Snug, working its way under a collar or into the folds of a hat. As soon as it reached the outer defenses, the bee would become inert. After waiting long enough for its unknowing host to have passed through the shields, the drone would reactivate, but only enough to become a passive receiver of sound and light as well as a few other emanations. It would store the information, since no transmission could make it out through the barriers, then go inert again when the person carrying it exited through the defenses. Once clear of the protected zone, the bee would leave its host and send a report or, if complete secrecy was desirable, it would wait until it had returned home.
This bee was now reporting as it whirred back to my workroom. I saw a small private room in the back of Bolly’s Snug, a rough table surrounded by a few chairs, a tankard on the tabletop, its handle in the sinewy grip of Massim Shar, clad in his customary black and gray and sitting in perfect stillness, the very image of a man who knew how to wait. Behind him stood a big fellow, corded arms folded across his broad chest, his face ornamented by rows of tattooed symbols.
“Interesting,” I said to my assistant. “Shar has acquired the services of Hak Binram.”
“The question is,” said the integrator, “whether Binram has hired on for this evening only, or for a continuing relationship.”
“Either way, it is another sign that Shar is now circulating among the uppermost strata of the halfworld.”
“Hush,” said Chonder. “Look.”
The screen now showed the door to the room opening inward. Through the doorway came the man in the glitter suit, carrying a satchel. He placed his burden on the table, performed a respectful gesture, and stood expectantly. Massim Shar gestured for him to open the satchel. The man did as he was bid and the thief glanced into the opening. Then Shar signaled to Hak Binram, who approached the man in the incognito suit and applied something he held in one huge hand to the dull metal collar around the courier’s neck. The solid ring came apart and Binram removed it and tucked it into a pocket. The man in the incognito suit said not a word, but his posture bespoke great relief of tension. He turned and swiftly departed, closing the door behind him.
Hak Binram now went to stand with his back pressed to the portal, and it would have been a strong man indeed who could have opened it against the pressure of the tattooed man’s shoulders.
Massim Shar took an u
nhurried swallow from the tankard and set it aside. Slowly, almost leisurely, he widened the satchel’s neck then upturned the container to spill its contents out onto the table: a pile of glittering gems of several sizes, cuts, and colors. The thief sorted through them then nodded in satisfaction.
“Intelligent,” my assistant said. “The ransom was converted into untraceable valuables before it was brought to Massim Shar. He cannot be connected with the extortion.”
“Indeed,” I said, watching as Shar took a dark red stone twice the size of my thumbnail and tossed it toward the man guarding the door. Binram’s hand flashed out with surprising speed and caught the glittering jewel. He pocketed it, then as Shar rose and tucked the satchel under his arm, Binram opened the door and paused to look out into the space beyond before signaling to his employer that all was as it should be. The last image I saw was of the thief’s wiry fingers extending toward the bee’s point of view, which told the device—hidden in Shar’s hat or cloak on a chair beside the table—that it was time to go dark again.
“Well, there it is,” I said. “But again I advise you to let the matter rest.”
Irslan Chonder was on his feet, his eyes still fixed on the air where the screen had hung. The muscles in his jaw moved as if small animals were burrowing under his skin. “No,” he said, without looking at me. Then he turned his hard gaze my way and I had to summon up an extra reserve of professional coolness not to give in to the impulse to look away. “I want you to help me with the next step,” he said.
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